Product Manager

Our Mission: Making Africa Cashless

Wave Mobile Money is on a mission to make Africa the first cashless continent. Since 2017, we've been building accessible financial services—no account fees, instant availability, and widespread acceptance—to empower communities where traditional banking falls short. We started in Senegal with mobile app for cash deposits, withdrawals, and payments, and have since expanded to millions of users across 9 countries, growing rapidly.

How You'll Help Us Achieve It

As Wave becomes the largest financial institution in Senegal and Côte d'Ivoire, with millions of users, the Product Manager will play a pivotal role in shaping our product roadmap and impact. Product Managers at Wave lead cross-functional teams, taking full ownership of their product domain. This involves defining goals, metrics, and roadmaps based on user needs and mission impact.

Key responsibilities include:

• Leading cross-functional teams with full product domain ownership.
• Defining product goals, metrics, and roadmaps aligned with user needs and mission.
• Driving user research, especially in-market across Africa, using both in-person and data-driven insights.
• Writing clear, compelling design documents and facilitating fast, async decision-making.
• Over-communicating context, priorities, and decisions for team alignment.
• Adjusting priorities quickly based on feedback, experiments, or new learnings.
• Solving problems holistically, integrating product features, ops tooling, or process changes.
• Championing users and ensuring we meet them where they are.

In This Role, You'll...

• Own a product or feature holistically, including necessary internal tooling.
• Relentlessly gather feedback (user conversations, data analysis) to deeply understand the problem space and user needs.
• Work from first principles to identify major user problems and design product solutions.
• Prioritize key issues blocking product growth and impact.
• Directly manage a small product team to rapidly iterate and deploy improvements, gather feedback, and expand reach.

Key Details

This is a fully remote role, requiring candidates to be based in one of our talent hub countries (UK, Spain, USA, Canada, Kenya, Ghana) or operating markets (Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, Burkina Faso). Wave offers a yearly $1,200 stipend for coworking meetups, and remote team members are expected to travel to operational markets at least once per quarter to understand users and product firsthand. Competitive salaries range from $142,200 - $213,400 USD, plus generous equity, based on level and location.

Major benefits include:

• Subsidised health insurance and retirement contributions (country-specific).
• 6 months fully paid parental leave and subsidised fertility assistance.
• Flexible vacation (21-30 days/year typically).
• $10,000 annual charitable donation matching.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience in product management, ideally in high-ownership, fast-paced environments like scale-ups or startups.
• Proven success overseeing all elements of the product development lifecycle (user research, design, implementation, evaluation).
• Fluent English communication skills.

Bonus points if you:

• Speak at least conversational French.
• Have professional experience in a consumer fintech company.
• Are a mobile money user in Sub-Saharan Africa.

You Might Be a Good Fit If You...

• Resonate deeply with Wave's product approach and have experience working this way.
• Are a strong communicator who can inspire and lead by influence.
• Excel at coordinating across teams and communicating across multiple cultures.
• Have a strong intuition for user-focused product design and obsess over user experience.
• Take ownership for outcomes and drive them to fruition.
• Have strong instincts for asking impactful questions.
• Possess the courage and persistence to adapt plans based on new information.
• Listen with empathy while ruthlessly prioritizing based on impact.
• Are excited about travel to meet users in Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, and other African countries.

About Product at Wave

Product is central to Wave, championed by our product-minded founders. Product Managers here play a critical role, influencing large parts of the company. Our product-building approach is lightweight, principles-driven, and empowers PMs to own problems end-to-end, setting goals and guiding teams towards tangible outcomes for real people. If this resonates, we'd love to meet you.

Our Team

Wave boasts a rapidly growing in-country team across nine African nations and remote members globally. We are passionate about our mission of providing radically affordable financial services. We foster employee autonomy, allowing full ownership from problem understanding to solution monitoring. We raised Africa's largest Series A in 2021 with world-class investors like Founders Fund, Sequoia Heritage, and Stripe, and are recognized on Y Combinator's top companies by revenue list.

How to Apply

Complete the form and upload your resume in English, along with a cover letter detailing your interest in Wave Mobile Money and this Product Manager role. We frequently review applications and recommend applying to the role that best matches your skills and career goals. Wave is an equal-opportunity employer committed to diversity and inclusion.

Key skills/competency

• Product Management
• User Research
• Fintech
• Product Development Lifecycle
• Cross-functional Leadership
• Mobile Money
• User Experience (UX)
• Data-Driven Decision Making
• Market Research (Africa)
• Strategic Prioritization