Product Manager

Position Overview

• Sanlam Fintech x is a newly established digital first business unit within the Sanlam Group on a mission to democratize financial advice and solutions for everyone across the African continent. We exist to pioneer inclusive financial confidence helping people build strong foundations to bridge the gap in generational wealth. Our culture is that of agility and constant deployment, we believe in learning fast, learning cheap and learning forward. Our aim is to provide a work environment where knowledge workers can accelerate the development of their ideas and bring innovation to market, at the same time provide compelling career and development proposition that will enable them to realize their dreams.
• Sanlam Fintech x is looking for a Product Manager to join the central Digital Product function, reporting to a Head of Product. This role will own a meaningful part of the end-to-end digital customer journey, from discovery and strategy through delivery, launch, optimisation and ongoing performance management. You will work closely with engineering, design, data, marketing, finance, risk, compliance and information security stakeholders to deliver customer and business value in a regulated financial services environment. This is a senior individual contributor role with strong influence across teams. It is not a people management role, but it does require leadership, sound judgement, stakeholder management and the ability to coach and support less experienced product managers where needed. The ideal candidate combines strong product thinking with commercial awareness, customer empathy, delivery discipline and the ability to make high-quality decisions using evidence, context and clear trade-offs 

What will you do?
As a Product Manager, you will:

• Own product strategy, roadmap, prioritisation and execution for your assigned product domain or customer journey.
• Define clear product problems, opportunities, outcomes and success metrics aligned to business and customer goals.
• Partner with stakeholders across business units and central teams, including technology, design, data, marketing, finance, risk, compliance and information security. 
• Drive product discovery by using customer research, behavioural data, analytics, market insight and business context to identify opportunities and validate ideas. 
• Translate strategy into a well-prioritised product backlog that balances customer value, business value, technical feasibility and regulatory considerations. 
• Work closely with a Tech Lead and a cross-functional team to build, test, release and improve digital products and features.
• Lead product decision-making across the product lifecycle, including trade-offs on scope, sequencing, timing and investment.
• Monitor product performance using input, output and outcome metrics, and use those insights to drive continuous improvement. 
• Ensure that non-functional requirements such as security, compliance, auditability, operational resilience and customer data considerations are incorporated into product decisions.
• Communicate product direction, priorities, progress, risks and decisions clearly to stakeholders at different levels of the organisation. • Contribute to strong product practices within Sanlam Fintech, including mentoring and coaching less experienced product managers where appropriate. 

Qualification and Experience

• 5+ years' product management experience, with at least 2 years on developer-facing or platform products (internal platforms, dev tooling, APIs, data/ML platforms) in a modern cloud context.
• Hands-on familiarity with AI coding agents and LLM-based products, shipped with them, or built on them, and you have a point of view on evals, cost and trust. 
• Comfortable working with autonomous, high-performing engineering teams and with security/compliance stakeholders (data residency, POPIA, RBAC, audit).
• Experience defining and tracking product metrics and SLOs; exposure to budget and cost-of-compute thinking is a plus.

What will make you successful in this role?
In this role, success will typically include:

• Delivering product or feature outcomes that improve meaningful customer and business metrics.
• Shaping and executing a clear roadmap within your product area.
• Building strong working relationships across business, technology and control functions. 
• Helping teams make better product decisions with better evidence.
• Raising the quality of product thinking and execution within the broader product function 

Required Behavioural Competencies
SFTx's 6 Leadership Principles: 

• Ownership Mindset – Looking for ways to do, instead of reasons not to. Being accountable for actions and decisions, owning both successes and mistakes, and learning and growing from each experience.
• Growth Mindset – Always learning and improving, getting better each time. Embracing challenges and failures as opportunities for growth.
• Customer Centricity – A deep understanding of the customer seen in everything you do. Being led by customers, their feedback and their behaviours.
• Innovation (Jugaad) – Where some see impossible, seeing a way. Doing more with less, applying creativity to turn obstacles into opportunities, chance into change.
• Velocity – Moving fast and fixing things. Working iteratively to deliver customer value without sacrificing long-term value for short-term results.
• Inclusion – Seeking out and valuing different perspectives. Believing that when we change how we look at things, how things look for us also changes, making tomorrow not just different, but better.