Job Title: Senior Product Associate
Organisation: Educate!
Duty Station: Kampala, Uganda
About Organisation:
Educate! prepares youth in Africa with the skills to succeed in today’s economy. We tackle youth unemployment by partnering with schools and governments to reform what schools teach and how they teach it, so that students in Africa have the skills to attain further education, overcome gender inequities, start businesses, get jobs and drive development in their communities. Our model is delivered through practically-trained teachers and youth mentors. Educate!’s goal is to make this practical, skills-based model part of national education systems.
Job Summary: At Educate!, the Senior Product Associate will play a crucial role in driving user research, product experimentation, and continuous improvement to meet the needs of Africa’s youth. This role combines hands-on experimentation, ensuring that all product development efforts align with Educate!’s long-term mission of transforming education for millions of youth across Africa. The successful candidate will collaborate with cross-functional teams to lead user-centered validations, develop frameworks for experimentation, and optimize product development processes.
The Educate! Experience is currently impacting 32,000 youth in Ugandan secondary schools and is Educate!s most mature product. Within the context of this product we continuously seek to maintain and deepen our impact whilst also conducting research and development initiatives that benefit other Educate! Products. The Senior Product Associate will play a pivotal role in ensuring data-driven insights are available to guide the product team in strategic decisions and inform product improvements. The Senior Product Associate will be trusted to define the plan and execute against a discrete feature component or workstream with minimal managerial direction. In addition, they support knowledge management and knowledge exchange across products to ensure insights from EXP inform other products. By supporting product leaders in building high-impact, user-driven products, this role is central to Educate!’s mission of creating educational solutions that drive meaningful change.
The ideal candidate will recognize this as their core skills set:
Customer-Centric Approach: Bring a deep understanding of user needs, leveraging feedback and insights to continuously refine product offerings. They should be excited about interacting with youth and driven by a sense of curiosity to deeply understand their needs and opportunities to set them up for success.
Collaborative and Team-Oriented: This role requires seamless collaboration with product leaders, designers, programs implementation teams and other key stakeholders. The candidate must excel in fostering a positive, cross-functional work environment, driving alignment across teams, and proactively manage a small set of working relationships independently, particularly with the LX Designer, the product strategist and the implementation lead.
Clear Communication: Strong written and verbal communication skills are essential. The candidate must effectively translate complex product ideas and insights into actionable plans for both technical and non-technical teams.
Project Management, Problem-Solving, and Innovation: The ideal candidate should demonstrate strong project management capabilities to drive the successful end-to-end implementation of experiments. They must be skilled at identifying obstacles and devising solutions that ensure efficient product iterations and timely delivery.
Analytical and Data-Driven: The candidate should possess a strong data analysis skill set and analytical mindset, comfortable with cleaning, analyzing, and interpreting complex data to derive actionable insights. Familiarity with data analytics tools and experimentation methodologies is crucial for informed decision-making.
Key Duties and Responsibilities:
- Lead end-to-end project management and execution of experiments and continuous discovery against EXP product roadmap
- Design and Manage Experiment Implementation: Lead the end-to-end project management and execution of experiments within the product team to validate hypotheses and improve the user experience, ensuring alignment with product goals.
- Utilize the Sandbox Process: Drive the use of the sandbox environment within the team to prototype, test, and validate product features in a controlled, low-risk setting.
- Define Metrics and KPIs: Collaborate with the product team to establish clear metrics and KPIs for each experiment, ensuring they align with both immediate and long-term product objectives.
- Document and Share Insights: Maintain comprehensive documentation of experiment outcomes and share key learnings within the team to continuously optimize future experimentation efforts in and beyond EXP.
- Increase the EXP impact unit capability to rapidly test and iterate while running a product at scale
- Co-Create Experimentation Frameworks: Collaborate with the product team and product ops function to adapt and apply standardized experimentation frameworks (e.g., A/B testing, multivariate testing, and rapid prototyping) to fit the specific needs of the product.
- Provide Tools and Resources: Leverage the tools, resources, and processes rolled out by the product operations function to streamline experimentation within the product team.
- Enhance Methodologies: Work with the product team to continuously assess and refine experimentation methodologies, ensuring they are aligned with best practices and the product’s unique requirements.
- Support Team Training: Co-create training and resources with the product operations function to empower the product team in utilizing experimentation frameworks effectively for product development.
- Facilitate feedback loops from youth and frontline teams to enhance product design and delivery
- Lead User Research: Conduct usability testing, user interviews, and other research efforts to validate product assumptions and gain insights into user needs.
- Synthesize Feedback: Analyze user feedback and data to provide actionable insights that inform product improvements.
- Integrate Insights Continuously: Ensure that user insights are regularly incorporated into the product development process to drive ongoing refinement.
- Advocate for Users: Champion user-centered design solutions in product discussions and iterations to ensure the product aligns with user needs.
- Collaborate on Feedback Integration: Work with the product team to establish efficient processes for transforming frontline feedback into actionable backlog items, ensuring this feedback is prioritized and integrated into future product iterations.
- Collaborate closely with LX designers to co-design prototypes, ensuring user insights are rapidly translated into testable concepts.
- Driving Data-Driven Insights to inform product strategy
- Conduct Data Analysis, Monitor KPIs, and Formulate Strategic Recommendations: Lead the cleaning, analysis, and interpretation of quantitative and qualitative data and support the tracking of key performance indicators (KPIs) to assess product efficiency, quality, and impact.
- This includes formulating clear, evidence-based recommendations for feature direction and advocating for a defined position during strategic decision-making.
- Support Feature Prioritization: Assist the product strategist in prioritizing and implementing frontline-driven features, collaborating with the team to streamline the feedback loop and reduce the cycle time from insight capture to feature release.
- Facilitate Continuous Improvement: Participate in regular retrospectives and reviews to optimize the integration of feedback into product development, helping to refine experimentation practices and ensure that product improvements are consistently aligned with user needs.
Qualifications, Skills and Experience:
- 5 years in product management, operations, or related fields with a focus on experimentation and user-centered design.
- Skills: Proven project management abilities, strong data analysis skills, analytical mindset, strong communication abilities, and a solid understanding of experimentation tools and methodologies.
- Attributes: Collaborative, data-driven, and proactive, with a passion for driving user-focused product improvements.
- Informal Leadership: Demonstrate informal leadership by serving as a visible technical resource for others on the team, and may be asked to mentor or onboard junior associates.
- Dynamic experience is highly preferred, and can operate well in complex and fast-changing environments.
- The ideal candidate has worked in a very early-stage startup trying to achieve product-market fit or led a new product or program within a larger organization.
- Experience working with diverse stakeholders and managing many priorities
- Passion for Educate!’s mission is a must, but past work in education or youth development is not required.
- We value diverse perspectives and encourage applications from people with various backgrounds.
- Background working with youth in the informal sector would be an asset.
- Fits our Five Culture Tenets (see What is Educate! About? below); Learn more by looking at Educate!’s culture deck here
How to Apply:
All suitably qualified and Interested applicants should apply online at the link below.
NB: Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted.
For more of the latest jobs, please visit https://www.theugandanjobline.com or find us on our facebook page https://www.facebook.com/UgandanJobline
Level of Education: bachelor degree
Work Hours: 8
Experience in Months: 60