JOB DESCRIPTION

Job Title:          Product Manager - Transit

Department:    Product Department

Reporting to:   Product Owner - Transit

Product Manager - Roam Transit/Electric Buses

Description

Roam, previously Opibus, is a Swedish-Kenyan technology company that develops, designs and deploys electric vehicles tailored for the African continent, leading the transition to sustainable transport. We focus on designing and co-developing tailored products for the local use-case that unlocks mass-scale deployment to a completely untapped market.

We require immense amounts of autonomy, work ethics, deep technical knowledge, product experience and a doer attitude as the Product Owner. This to support our massive scale up of local assembly of electric motorcycles and buses to meet the near to unlimited demand of our commercially validated products. The main areas we require excellence in are strategizing for an efficient product roadmap, product development life cycle, technology integration as well as manufacturing.

About us

Our vision is to make electric mobility more accessible to a broader market by making the technology more cost-efficient and simplifying deployment. Roam focuses on mass transit products, such as electric motorcycles used for taxi and delivery as well as electric buses in a public transport setting. We're currently looking to hire a talented Chief of People to help us deliver the ambitious and exciting milestones in an evolving roadmap across our full range of products and services.

About the role:

We are looking for a Product Manager who will manage the company’s electric bus division, with experience from product development and shipping hardware. The role will be focused on managing product team work and task management towards technical functional teams. Developing structures and tools to follow up on the process as well as handle the administrative side of product development. This role requires deep organizational skills and a lot of follow up with team members.

We are looking for a person that has already been part of a similar journey, scaling a team with many technical roles preferably in Africa. A good understanding of digital systems and how-to priorities crucial tasks in the process of developing a product and technical functions while in the midst of launching a product in parallel.

You will be in charge of managing the processes of the entire product team and processes related to building and maintaining product lines. You will be acting as an advisor for the Product Owner and Chief of Product but must also be able to roll up your sleeves and execute solutions engineering, commercialization as well as project management. You will manage the process of developing, launching, costing and running a team while taking many stakeholders aspects in consideration.

Roam aims to be a diverse and high performing environment which has to be at the highest priority. We offer an adventure, extreme career development as well as a once in a lifetime opportunity, which we want everyone to understand.

You will be independent in your role and will report directly to the Product Owner and Chief of Product and work closely with both.

The ideal candidate must have experience from a rapidly growing hardware company being Project/Product manager or similar position, with a deep understanding of the complete product development process as well as how to efficiently integrate technology, manufacturing processes and commercialization in an automotive setting.

They should have experience of a scale-up phase of a company, managing a product team. While also balancing tight deadlines with compromises to reach product milestones and releases. Ideally with a broad knowledge of different systems of product management, processes and structures. Engineering background is ideal since the Product Manager will work closely with the functional engineering teams to reach the product milestones.

Experience from working in Sub-Saharan Africa is preferable.

Key Duties and responsibilities:

• Determining feature requirements.
• Researching customer experiences and demands.
• Improving customer experience of product.
• Outlining a detailed product strategy.
• Manage communication with cross-functional teams.
• Coordinating our partners for outsourced co-design, manufacturing and assembly.
• Coordinating our suppliers, mainly in China.
• Managing product roadmaps and releases.
• Understanding product selling points.
• Identifying and filling product gaps.
• Generating new product ideas.
• Developing product pricing and positioning strategies.
• Working alongside engineering teams.
• Working with PR and marketing teams to manage product launches.
• Acting as a product evangelist and representing the company at public events and with the press.

Qualifications

• Must have at least 6 years’ experience in product ownership / management
• Must have a relevant bachelor's degree/ diploma
• Must have experience managing a product, technical or development team
• Must have experience working with digital systems and management software
• Must have excellent communication skills
• Preferably previous experience from the automotive sector and/or electric mobility
• Preferably previous experience from working with Chinese suppliers and industry

Education: Bachelor’s Degree/ Diploma Certificate

Location: Nairobi Kenya

Deadline: 1st April 2023

We aim to contact all our applicants, but due to high volumes of applications only shortlisted candidates are contacted. If you do not hear from us within two weeks your application has not been successful on this occasion. This does not mean you will not be considered for future roles so please keep an eye on our job board and apply for positions that match your skills and experience.