Job Description

Position: Program Director (Technology) Location: Remote in Africa Reporting to: Chief Product & Technology Officer
Role Profile: Kyosk is looking for a passionate Program Director to join our Product and Technology leadership team. You will be an individual contributor while also managing a team that owns project planning, project governance, and release management across the Kyosk platform and product portfolio. As Program Director your goal will be to ensure that all projects are successfully delivered on time, within budget, and add value to the company. You will oversee all programs within the division from conception through implementation and delivery. Your duties include assembling project implementation teams, developing project and release milestones, and providing management visibility into the status of all initiatives. As a Program Director, you’ll join our growing team of professionals who share a passion for building technology that empowers traditional retailers (kiosks) across the African continent. You’ll work with teams from multiple countries across the organization to imagine and build innovative solutions for Kyosk’s customers and internal teams. Key Responsibilities

• Leadership: Be the model leader who your team looks up to. Improve processes to make them more effective. Develop their knowledge and domain expertise and instil a relentless focus on quality and scale. Take ownership of what your team does and coordinate their efforts to ensure efficient completion of tasks. Eliminate obstacles that prevent your team from performing optimally.
• Project Management: Initiate and set goals for various projects per the company’s strategic objectives and product roadmap. Provide visibility of project statuses and beat the drum to ensure that deadlines and timelines are consistently met.
• Coordination: Establish a harmonized and transparent flow of information between product management and software engineering by aligning all aspects of planning through to delivery across multiple products and engineering teams. Ensure productivity and collaboration tools are adopted and used consistently across all teams.
• Administration: Lead the administering and configuring the tools used by the Product and Engineering teams for effective planning and collaboration. This includes budgeting for licenses, managing vendors and payments due to them, maintaining a clean user base and defining and enforcing best practice adoption of these tools including Jira, Confluence, ProductBoard, Miro and Figma. Ensure that Kyosk’s use of these tools is kept lean and clean.
• People Management: Actively work with the rest of Product and Technology leadership to build a great team that complements, supports and inspires each other to achieve greatness. Ensure effective recruitment, training and development programs are adopted to promote productivity, retention, motivation and morale. Manage the career path and goals of your direct reports, conducting regular 1-on-1s and having monthly performance dialogues. Handle complex or sensitive people matters with empathy.
• Performance Management: You will set and review performance and development goals for your team and report to management on how they are performing and how they can improve. You identify timeframes and readiness for promotion of direct reports; solicit cross-functional feedback in support of promotions and employee rewards. You will coach and mentor your team in the art of delivering successful project outcomes at scale while growing their careers.
• Culture: Along with Kyosk’s People organization (HR) and other leaders, you will craft a winning culture that spans multiple country boundaries and is built on collaboration and shared accomplishments while having fun along the way. You eliminate siloed thinking and misalignment that detracts from what needs to be accomplished and you actively work toward stamping out any such behaviours. You help create an environment that fosters innovation and encourages the taking of smart risks and learning from failures;
• Governance: As a senior-level contributor your role encompasses aspects of corporate governance related to project planning, project management and release planning to help ensure that Kyosk’s investment in Product and Technology delivers optimal returns in line with the business and product strategy.
• Performance Monitoring: Build a deep understanding of how our processes and products work, how they are developed, and how they are used. Identify and track metrics that ensure performance targets for the program management function are met and recommend process improvements. Pay attention to the rest of the team’s metrics and performance, and seek ways in which you can support their quest for improvement.
• Process Improvement: Actively monitor, determine and recommend methods to streamline and improve processes and procedures. Spearhead initiatives to identify opportunities for new projects and improved processes.
• Stakeholder Management: Prepare and deliver various project updates to be delivered internally and externally.

Minimum Requirements & Key Skills:

• At least 10+ years of project management experience for fast-growing software development companies;
• Experience managing projects from conception to design, coding, testing, deployment and release into real production environments where mistakes and delays could be costly;
• A minmum of 3+ years as a Team Lead or Manager with people management responsibilities and a track record of hiring and growing a talented team of Project Managers;
• Adept at setting targets, and at identifying appropriate metrics and milestones to ensure that those targets are achieved in 90%+ of the cases;
• Experienced in delivering projects successfully in an agile environment using scrum. Comfortable with all the roles, artifacts and tools that equip scrum teams to succeed.
• Expert-level proficiency with tools used by project management professionals to organize, manage and provide visibility into the projects being managed;
• The ability to align people behind a common goal. You can explain and materialize the objectives of all activities within your domain;
• Conversant in product management, software development and quality assurance methodologies and energized by interactions with these functions;
• Ability to successfully collaborate with multiple teams simultaneously and to context switch as needed;
• Outstanding organizational, communication, interpersonal and relationship-building skills.

Desired Behavioral Competencies

• You have experience in handling the pressure of fast-paced environments typical of a tech startup environment where you wear multiple hats and have access to limited resources

• You have a willingness to temporarily step into a void left by your peers and subordinates when they are unavailable or have resigned. Also when a new role has been created and is yet to be filled.

• You have a strong desire for continuous improvement

• You can work under pressure, with tight timelines and ambitious deadlines

• You have a passion for digital products

• You can stay motivated through difficult challenges, and occasional long hours

• Your passion is contagious, and you use it to inspire the rest of the team

• You have equal empathy for internal users and our target market of traditional retailers

• You have a strong work ethic and exhibit genuine care for the team and their processes, with a willingness to go to great lengths to ensure their success

• You have integrity: You do what you say you will do and make no excuses.

• You develop a deep understanding and respect for what each team member is responsible for and trust them to do their job

• Your confidence and experience make you trust your instinct and communicate persuasively. You know when to make decisions (even when others might disagree) vs when to build consensus, and you can articulate the strategy and business rationale behind your decisions.

• You are comfortable taking the blame if something goes wrong, and equally quick to give credit to the rest of the team when it goes well

• You are detail-oriented, process-driven, and organized, and can stay two steps ahead of the work your teams are doing

About Kyosk Digital Services Limited Kyosk is a tech-led company that connects informal retailers and other similar outlets directly to fast-moving consumer goods companies (FMCGs) by communicating demand from retail outlets directly to FMCGs and their distributors and managing the delivery of the goods to the retailers. Our digital-first platform ensures that retail outlets get access to stock at competitive prices and have them delivered directly to them. FMCGs find the traditional distribution chain to be inadequate as well, making it expensive for them to serve kiosk-type retail outlets, leading to high incidences of product stock-outs and lost sales opportunities. By providing FMCGs with good data visibility, we solve this major problem of theirs. Kyosk further applies technology to bring financial inclusion to millions of informal retailers and consumers across Africa. By developing and leveraging fintech innovations, we constantly improve how we collect and reconcile payments for goods, driving towards 100% digitized payments. Our Product and Engineering teams are developing solutions at the forefront of innovation in Africa.