Location: South Africa | Ghana | Kenya

Type: Full Time

Currently reports to: CEO

About The Folklore

The Folklore is a platform providing consumer goods brands with resources to grow their business and collaborate with global partners. Our software and marketplace tools help fashion, beauty, and home brands manage their wholesale business and access capital, while enabling retailers and service providers to better discover more diverse and emerging market brands. The Folklore’s technology, education, and community offering empowers emerging brands to globalize and scale their business.

The Folklore is a Techstars (Techstars Seattle 21’) and venture capital-backed company that has been featured by Vogue, Forbes, Fast Company, Inc., Bloomberg, and Entrepreneur. The company works with enterprise retailers like Nordstrom, Shopbop, Revolve, and Bergdorf Goodman.

About the Role

We are hiring a Product Manager to own and define our product roadmap and manage building and shipping products that our B2B users will value and love using. The Product Manager will be the sole member of the Product team and have a significant impact on the company’s Product growth. They will work directly with the CEO to define the short and long term vision for product growth based on user data. Two core responsibilities are consistently engaging in user discovery research and designing and overseeing project management systems that ensure engineering’s timely shipment of product. This is an opportunity to get in on the ground level and work closely with our CEO to develop a barrier breaking world-class company.

Responsibilities:

• Use your deep technical understanding of B2B SaaS/marketplace platforms to help define and prioritize features and product iterations
• Build a pipeline of users to regularly communicate with to understand their needs and proactively define features or updates that will improve their experience
• Build and send quarterly user surveys to understand user experience & test new ideas
• Competitor research to help define product roadmap and product specifications for upcoming features pending development
• Create all initial specs, flipbooks, and wireframes for designers and engineers
• Work with internal and external designers to help make your vision visually delightful and intuitive for a very style-conscious customer base.
• Define and manage our sprints by dividing ambitious features into smaller, prioritized components & making sure engineering hits timeline targets.
• Source and manage freelance talent to help execute on product goals, including but not limited to product designer, demo video content creators, etc.
• QA test all upcoming features before they ship and provide feedback to engineering
• QA test existing features on the platform on a weekly basis & flag issues
• Take all technical tickets shared by the Customer Success team and add them to Jira, marking the priority of each.
• Following up to make sure all technical fixes are done by engineering within SLA
• Find third party apps to solve simple product requests or issues to avoid building
• Making sure all new features have corresponding email triggers, are connected to appropriate admin tools, and are attached to the marketing systems

Who You Are:

• Experience defining, building, and shipping a complex product for the web and mobile, making it extremely intuitive for a non-technical user base.
• Extremely well organized and can manage multiple projects simultaneously and prioritize effectively
• A strong executer willing to take a hands-on approach
• Great communication skills, continuous learning, and bias for action
• Great team player with passion for encouraging cross-functional collaboration and alignment
• You are a creative problem-solver. You excel at identifying simple solutions to tough problems
• You are relentlessly resourceful. When something needs to get done, you always find a way to make it happen. Even when the work is hard, you have the drive to power through it and execute with limited information and ambiguity
• Experience at early-stage startups, working in ambiguity, looking for gaps in the product, and having a very high attention to detail

Must Have:

• Bachelor’s degree
• 5-7 years of full time product management experience at B2B SaaS/marketplace startup that caters to SMBs
• Experience evaluating and working with external APIs and third-party technical partnerships
• Experience defining and working with internal APIs and building internal tools and dashboards
• Experience working with UX and prototyping tools like Figma create functional, interactive specs
• Experience reaching out to users and interviewing them

Bonus to Have: 

• Technical experience with coding or ability to weigh the pros and cons of technical architectures
• Experience working with an international user base, including different currencies and languages