Product Manager - Catalogue

Mr D,  a division of takealot.com, is looking for a highly talented Product Manager (Catalogue) to join our Partner Services team in Cape Town.

The Product team at Mr D is passionate about creating experiences that delight our customers, while ensuring we continuously acquire and retain customers to exceed our growth objectives.  You will work cross-functionally across our product, UX, engineering and other business teams to build features that have a direct impact on the growth and sustainability of Mr D. 

This position reports to the Product Lead (Partner Services).

Your mission, should you choose to accept it: 

Own the roadmap and execution of the catalogue management product portfolio within Mr D. This includes successful onboarding of partners and their catalogues across Food, Shops and Groceries, ensuring catalogues meet the standard for listing quality, and driving improvements in catalogue management to make life easier for our partners.

Key responsibilities: 

Product Strategy and road mapping

• Gain a deep understanding of the Catalogue division in terms of its strategic objectives, business processes, available tools and systems, and relevant external best practice benchmarks.
• Work closely with the Product Lead for Partner Services to define and maintain a Product Roadmap that delivers on technical developments required to support the Catalogue Division in achieving its strategic objectives.
• Contribute to the catalogue management product strategy.
• Define and own the catalogue management product roadmap.
• Maintain and prioritise the catalogue management backlog through collaboration with the Head of Product, Product Lead, multiple business stakeholders and senior management.

Product development

• Define the strategic business requirements for technical systems development related to specific projects prioritised on the Product Roadmap, using relevant data to support decision-making.
• Translate business requirements into functional and technical IT user stories and project specifications, by ensuring that projects are broken down into phases to deliver immediate business benefit.
• End-to-end project management of technical projects throughout the entire product development lifecycle: setting timelines, driving project schedules, leading cross-functional development teams from design through to release, and managing the production launch.
• Manage the engineering backlog via appropriate sprint prioritisation and planning.
• Manage the execution and rollout of catalogue management features across the Mr D platform. This includes the entire product development cycle from design, documentation, implementation, testing and launch to success metric monitoring.
• Write detailed product specification documents for the engineering and design teams using both traditional and AI-accelerated methods for mobile applications, back-end application logic, APIs, integrations, and browser-based internal and partner-facing tools.
• Collaborate and communicate effectively cross functionally to drive implementation of these specifications (i.e. define objectives and success metrics, business rules, epics/user stories, write acceptance criteria and wireframes).
• Participate in and contribute to backlog grooming and planning ceremonies.
• Engage with subject matter experts to analyse trade-offs and resolve priority conflicts.
• Clarify product requirements and create acceptance criteria with QA.
• Perform pre-launch user acceptance testing (UAT).
• Collaborate with technical teams to document high-level non-functional requirements.
• Contribute to technical design decisions for relevant projects.
• Work with the partner onboarding team, catalogue operations team, groceries team, shops team, food team, BI team and customer support team to bring everything together to ensure partners can list and manage their catalogues with ease.

Qualitative  and Quantitative analysis

• Be responsible for defining and reporting on catalogue management success metrics such as catalogue onboarding turnaround time, listing quality scores, catalogue completeness, conversion driven by catalogue quality, and partner support contact reduction.
• Measure the success of developments via the tracking of relevant metrics.
• Take ownership of improving these metrics by identifying and prioritising appropriate roadmap projects.
• Move the needle of the team's "North Star" metric through consistent execution of projects.
• Monitor and analyse quantitative and qualitative data in order to identify opportunities for catalogue management improvements.
• Be proficient in understanding and knowing the data to look for and insights to extract when making decisions.

UX and UI design

• Suggest ideas to solve partner challenges and validate them in close collaboration with UX.
• Sign-off on design solutions (including copy) for owned products.
• Clearly communicate requirements to UX/UI design resources.

Stakeholder management

• Manage all stakeholder communications to ensure appropriate input on the Product Roadmap prioritisation and communication on its execution.
• Ensure relevant stakeholders are correctly identified and consulted.
• Utilise deep understanding of core stakeholder pain-points / objectives to drive relevant initiatives.
• Manage relationships with stakeholders including obtaining stakeholder buy-in for requirements and relevant project status communications.
• Manage relationships and integrations between Mr D and partner systems, including understanding the division of responsibilities and API integrations between Mr D and its partners..

Qualifications and experience / Requirements: 

• At least 3 years experience as a Product Manager or 5 years in a software development related role (e.g. Business Analysis, Product Owner).
• Bachelor's degree or Advanced Diploma in related field.
• In the event that a candidate does not have a Bachelor's Degree or Advanced Diploma in a related field, an equivalent experience requirement must be met.
• Strong technical acumen for integration.
• Understand machine learning, LLM and AI concepts and how they can be used to benefit the system.
• Ability to write specifications using traditional methods as well as AI-accelerated methods.
• Experience with analysing data and making data driven product decisions. (Data proficiency beneficial.)
• Experience with wireframing or design solutions.

The skills we need: 

• Able to prioritise and cope with competing priorities under pressure.
• Ability to work in a fast-paced, sometimes less-structured, and constantly changing environment.
• Able to take initiative in ambiguous situations, by identifying critical problems and driving solutions with the relevant people.
• Very data driven and should be comfortable to make data driven decisions and be able to extract business insights from data.
• Solution oriented, accountable and highly self motivated with a robust can do attitude.
• Strong sense of ownership and determination to get things done (not scared to get your hands dirty).
• Strong organisational skills & attention to detail.
• Great people skills (Adept at working closely and collaboratively with multiple departments and executives, and in cross-functional teams).
• Excellent problem-solving skills.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.
• Eagerness to experiment, learn and grow.
• The ability to focus beyond the features on the app, but also on Partner experience

Let’s talk about life @ Takealot Group

• The power is in your hands: We offer a market-related, Total Remuneration Package that allows full flexibility according to your needs. Go on, be the master of your own destiny.
• No doors: We aren’t fans of stuffy offices or siloed work environments. See someone you like? High five, collab and make something great.
• Remote working: Love water cooler chats and working from home? Takealot.com offers a remote working model with the option to come into the office. The choice is yours to be at the office, fully remote or a mix.
• Mentorship programme: We aren’t kidding when we say the people with the best people win. Now’s your chance to be one of the best, by learning from the best.
• Naspers Tech Community & Online Learning: Share ideas and grow with global industry leaders who are all just a Slack message away. Love to learn? Up-skill with free access to courses on MyAcademy, Udacity, Coursera and more.
• Good times: Get to know the other extraordinary minds at takealot.com during regular social events and out-of-office activities (think hikes, think mini golf, think good times).
• Staff discount: Millions of products across 28 departments. What more could you ask for?
• TakealotMore Benefit
• Birthday leave: Cake Day all the way. Enjoy your day off - you deserve it. 
• Right tools, right job: Mac or Windows, two monitors or one. Whatever your preference, you’ll work on the latest tech, off the latest tech.
• Help when you need it most: Confidential counselling, legal support, and financial guidance, for free, anytime, anywhere. 
• Tech stack (for days): ReactJS, Python, Scala, Kotlin, Swift, Google Cloud, Kafka, Redis, Kubernetes, and all things machine learning. If you build it, they will come.
• Free parking: No more 5km fun runs to your desk (unless you want to).