The Opportunity
One of the biggest untapped markets in fintech is personal financial advice. It’s also one of the toughest domains to crack. If you’re looking to build a successful career and make a huge impact in the lives of many South Africans, then this is the opportunity you’ve been searching for.
What are we all about?
LifeCheq is a fintech business operating in South Africa, specialised in personal finance. Our very unique holistic approach to financial advice and our market-leading advice platform has redefined the category. We operate the fastest growing and one of the largest financial advice platforms in the mass affluent market. We’re looking to scale our operations significantly in an exciting new chapter.
Our technology touches consumers, financial advisors and large financial institutions. Our mission is to give everyone access to high quality, personalised, holistic financial advice. If successful, you will be playing a key role in bringing holistic financial advisers to millions of clients.
We are looking for someone with the raw skills to be a great product manager and a passion for using technology to solve problems for clients in the personal finance domain. The products on which you will be working on in this role require you to have a background in actuarial science (but not necessarily be a qualified actuary). If you have such a background and want to move into a tech career, this is probably one of the best opportunities you will find to do that.
You’ll have access to plenty of training and support to become a great product manager, even if you’ve never worked in tech before. If you lack relevant experience in tech, however, you will be expected to do a rotation through our adviser support team, work in other product squads to gain the exposure, spend time travelling in the field with advisers and clients, and work through lots of hours of training material.
Our approach to product management is to have empowered cross-functional product teams led by capable product managers who have a very good understanding of the business and domain. We give our product managers a clear framework and a mandate to solve problems for customers in ways that drive business value, and we expect them to know how to solve problems, make decisions and take ownership of the outcome. So we do not hire project managers, traditional product owners who have mostly led feature-driven teams, or scrum masters. Prior experience in these areas doesn’t give you any advantage in applying for this role.
This role will report to a Group Product Manager and will interface with all levels of the organisation.
Your Responsibilities:
- Work with your Group Product Manager to shape the product vision and strategy for the products you will be responsible for
- Work closely with partners including insurance companies, asset managers, reinsurers, other technology companies to design and build new financial products
- Design and develop client and advisors journeys focused on Lifecheq’s unique approach to holistic advice
- Manage from discovery to concept, to design, development, testing, rollout, and support of applications/services on our platform, following the LifeCheq product playbook.
- Develop and maintain an understanding of how the product you’re working on creates customer and business value and what the most important levers are
- Develop and maintain a view of your key metrics and build instrumentation into the products you manage so you have an ongoing view of the performance of the product
- Gather ongoing feedback from advisers and clients directly; work closely with your product designer on doing product discovery and building the observational habits to understand the opportunities for your team to add value
- Work with your product designer and lead engineers to develop solutions and test them - you should be an active participant in the solution development process and try and get the best contributions from your whole team
- Collaborate with the platform engineering team on platform features
- Take responsibility for business outcomes of the products you’re responsible for: own tradeoffs, between cost, value to customers, internal stakeholder concerns;
- Ensure the product achieves targets in terms of client conversion, revenue, retention etc.
- Routine and ad-hoc management reporting on all activity and product performance
- Manage and recruit for roles within the product development team, including contractor/freelancer relationships.
What Skills You Will Bring
- In addition to exposure to actuarial science, you have a quantitative, technical background where you had formative years in your career solving technical problems that require skills from maths, stats, engineering, physics, data science, actuarial science, quantitative finance, software engineering, or similar
- You are an analytical, data-driven, critical thinker who can unpack a problem clearly, develop and communicate a hypotheses, frame experiments and test them rigorously
- You have had some exposure to a commercial or customer facing role; you are very open to interacting with customers and financial advisers regularly, and are passionate about using technology to solve problems
- You can communicate well with team members and stakeholders on deliverables and approach, demonstrating the ability to communicate and listen appropriately depending on the audience. We expect a good grounding in effective written communication in a technical context
- You strive for success, are keen to learn and develop, are collaborative with a can-do attitude, and can build positive relationships
- You have business acumen and have a grasp of the key concepts of how a business makes money, and you enjoy seeing your work make a tangible business impact
- You are experienced with and are comfortable engaging with senior executives at large and small companies - you’d be quite okay being asked to give a presentation to execs at a listed company in your first three months of work.
What It's Like To Work Here
We take the development of our people very seriously! We will work with you to carve out your success plan and an opportunity to accelerate your career and make a real difference. In addition to your competitive salary, medical and insurance benefit, you’ll enjoy some great perks including:
- Remote-first: We’re a remote first business, with a set up that optimises for async work; for this role, you will need to be able to travel easily within South Africa, so therefore need to be South African based
- Wellness: Enjoy half a day off dedicated to your health and wellness and receive a medical aid benefit paid directly to your account each month
- Maternity Leave Benefits: Bond with your little one whilst on paid maternity and paternity leave
- LifeCheq Shares: Celebrate your 1 year anniversary by receiving LifeCheq Shares Scheme
This is a permanent, full-time position.