Qualifications & Experience

• 5+ years in product management.

• Direct experience shipping consumer or SME products in fintech, banking, or lending.

• Track record of owning outcomes. You measure yourself by the metric that moved (revenue, active users,

• default rate, deposit growth), not by what was planned or shipped.

• Strong stakeholder coordination. You drive alignment across the cross-functional set above without losing your own thread.

• Strong written communication. You can write a spec a senior engineer does not need to ask questions about.

• Comfortable reading production data yourself. SQL fluency, or willing to get there in week one.

• Demonstrated proficiency with AI tools in your daily workflow (Claude Code, Claude Design, Codex, and similar tools). You have shipped real work with them, not just experimented.

• Comfortable reading and writing code, enough to ship a small PR with Claude Code.

• High agency. You move from problem to validated solution to shipped product without waiting to be told.

• Able to read CBK / CBN guidance and translate it into product requirements

Strategy & Discovery**

• Own the roadmap across Lending (Logbook, Asset Finance, UmbaPay Loans), Savings & Fixed Deposits, FX (Exchange, Virtual Account Numbers, international payouts), and the upcoming Trade Finance line.

• Run customer discovery directly with target segments: freelancers, SME exporters and importers, individual borrowers and savers.

• Size opportunities, instrument funnels, and validate hypotheses against production data. You do not wait for an analyst.

• Make prioritization calls across very different product lines (a credit-policy tweak vs. a new FX corridor vs. a deposit campaign) and defend them with numbers.

• Track competitor moves across African fintech (Eversend, Wave, Flutterwave, Kuda) and translate them into product decisions.                                   

Execution & Delivery**

• Write product and technical specifications that engineers and AI coding agents can implement directly.

• Tight, unambiguous, testable.

• Prototype in Claude Design to validate concepts before committing engineering time.

• Code and ship small PRs yourself with Claude Code when it is faster than handing off. PMs at Umba live in the codebase.

• Drive delivery end to end. Own scope, timeline, and quality.

• Run delivery in Linear, our next-gen product and project management surface.

• Run the cadence with Engineering: standups, sprint reviews, unblocking, bug triage, and trade-off calls when things slip.

• Coordinate across stakeholders (CEO, Engineering, Data, Credit, Operations, Risk, Compliance, Marketing).

• Align scope, ship dates, and trade-offs across teams that have different incentives.

• Own outcomes, not output. Tie every initiative to a revenue, growth, or risk metric. Track it post-launch and iterate until the metric moves.

• Review AI-generated implementations, prototypes, and analyses for correctness, edge cases, and business fit.

• Build feedback loops: customer signal, spec, AI-assisted build, metric, next spec. Compress the cycle.

• Own launch comms and internal enablement.