Agriculture Product Manager

Responsibilities

Product strategy and roadmap
Own the product roadmap from Season 1 MVP to Season 2 scaled platform — prioritising what gets built in what order based on operational evidence, not assumptions.
Define the build sequence for core modules.
Make explicit trade-off decisions: what stays manual vs what gets automated, what gets built vs what gets integrated (e.g. mobile money APIs, third-party NDVI tools).
Maintain a living product brief that founders and engineers can use as a single source of truth — updated after every field observation, not once a quarter.

Field operations and discovery
Spend time on the ground during Pilot — observing where the manual process breaks and where it does not.
Conduct structured discovery with farmers, field liaisons, union leaders, and input suppliers to understand actual user behaviour vs assumed behaviour.
Document every workaround, improvisation, and failure mode in the manual process — this is the product spec for Season 2.
Validate that onboarding flows work on feature phones before a single farmer is registered — not after.

Technical coordination
Work directly with the Technical Lead to scope, specify, and prioritise the engineering build for Season 2.
Write product requirements that are specific enough to build from — not vague feature descriptions.
Own acceptance criteria: nothing ships without field-tested validation that it works on the devices and connectivity conditions farmers actually have.
Manage the integration architecture.

Lender and partner product experience
Own the lender-facing product: the real-time portfolio dashboard used to monitor the loan book — the single most important feature for lender trust and retention.
Work with the client onboarding and process flow.

Data and risk model
Develop the data models.
Work with the founder to formalise the models and adopt ML and AI.
Manage the monitoring product.

Required experience and qualifications

Essential

• 3+ years of product management experience — at least 2 years in a startup or early-stage environment where the product did not yet exist in its final form.
• Demonstrable experience building digital products for low-connectivity environments — USSD, WhatsApp, feature phone interfaces, or offline-first mobile applications.
• Experience working directly with end users in the field — not just with analytics dashboards; you must have sat with the people who will use what you build.
• Strong data literacy: comfortable with spreadsheets, SQL basics, and the ability to interrogate a dataset to validate a product assumption without needing a data analyst.
• Arabic fluency — spoken and written — is preferred – and the cultural literacy to work effectively with farming communities, union leaders, and rural agro dealers.
• English proficiency sufficient for lender, investor, and insurance partner communications.
• Based in or willing to relocate to Sudan for Pilot.

Strongly preferred

• Experience in agricultural technology, agricultural finance, or development finance in Sub-Saharan Africa or MENA.
• Familiarity with agtech platforms.
• Working knowledge of agricultural systems or out-grower programs.
• Experience integrating financial APIs.
• Familiarity with remote sensing or GIS tools — even at a basic level.
• Experience working with or understanding of Islamic finance institutions.

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Agricultural Science, Finance, Business, or a related field.
Advanced degree or relevant professional qualification is advantageous but not required if the experience is demonstrably strong.