Head of Product, Merchant Solutions (SMME)

SOKIFY JOB OPENING Head of Product, Merchant Solutions (SMME) ABOUT THE ROLE Sokify is seeking an experienced and strategic Head of Product to lead our Merchant Solutions portfolio serving micro, small and medium enterprises. This is a critical leadership position where you'll shape the future of how African merchants do business. You'll own everything from payment acceptance and merchant apps to reconciliation tools, business services, and integrated credit solutions. Your mission is to build products that drive real commercial outcomes: growing our active merchant base, increasing platform usage, and expanding revenue while creating lasting value for SMEs across our markets. KEY RESPONSIBILITIES You'll define our merchant product vision, segmentation strategy and multi-year roadmap with clear commercial targets. This means owning our entire merchant stack, including payment acceptance methods (till solutions, Buy Goods, Paybill, QR codes), merchant applications and portals, notification systems, reconciliation features, business analytics tools and value-added services. A cornerstone of your approach will be activation-first thinking: prioritizing merchant adoption of existing capabilities before building new features. You'll run structured experiments on onboarding flows, product configuration and engagement tactics, holding your team accountable to measurable progress against merchant adoption metrics. You'll partner closely with our financial services teams to design working capital and credit products that leverage transaction data intelligently, while identifying and fixing friction points in the user journey. You'll drive the creation of unified merchant identity systems and common data frameworks that ensure every merchant has a single, clear view of their business performance and enable our teams across different markets to build on proven foundations. Building our evidence base is essential to your work. You'll establish core merchant metrics and KPIs, instrument user journeys for tracking and analysis, and make roadmap decisions grounded in data and direct merchant research rather than assumptions. On the operational side, you'll lead product strategy in vendor selection and contract negotiations, with particular focus on data rights, intellectual property ownership and reusability across our African markets. You'll manage delivery collaboratively with our internal engineering teams and external technology partners, ensuring consistent execution and quality. Finally, you'll build and mentor a high-performing product team, establishing the operating cadence and disciplines that drive results: discovery processes, product requirements documentation, release planning and post-launch reviews. EXPERIENCE AND QUALIFICATIONS REQUIRED You bring a minimum of 10 years in product management, with at least 4 years directly leading product teams or managing complete product portfolios. You have deep, hands-on experience in mobile money, payments or fintech, specifically within African markets, with proven success launching and scaling merchant, SME or agent-focused products. You have a demonstrated track record of launching and growing successful products in Kenya or comparable East African markets, supported by measurable commercial results. You possess strong foundational knowledge of merchant payments economics, including acceptance mechanisms, pricing structures, settlement processes, reconciliation requirements and the full merchant lifecycle. You're data literate and comfortable defining metrics independently, collaborating with analytics teams, interpreting SQL queries and designing robust experiments. You've successfully navigated complex stakeholder ecosystems involving operators, internal business functions, regulatory bodies and external partners, and you're skilled at influencing outcomes even without direct authority. Your communication skills are exceptional, both in writing and speaking, with demonstrated ability to present compelling cases to senior leadership. You hold a Bachelor's degree in business, economics, engineering, computer science or a related field. ADDITIONAL STRENGTHS WE'D VALUE Product leadership experience across multiple African countries would be a significant advantage. Familiarity with SME lending, working capital facilities or data-driven credit products would strengthen your impact. Experience successfully managing third-party technology vendors and complex commercial contracts is valued. Knowledge of Central Bank of Kenya regulations and broader regional payments and data protection frameworks would be beneficial. An MBA or other relevant postgraduate qualification would round out your profile nicely.