Product Manager

Our Mission: Making Africa the First Cashless Continent

Wave Mobile Money is on a mission to make Africa the first cashless continent by building financial services that are instantly available, accepted everywhere, and without account fees. In regions where traditional banking is inaccessible or costly, Wave provides essential financial tools, enabling cash deposits, withdrawals, peer-to-peer, and business payments via a mobile app. Launched in Senegal in 2017, Wave now serves millions of users across 9 countries, growing rapidly to become the largest financial institution in Senegal and Côte d'Ivoire.

Wave is still in the early stages of its product roadmap, with significant potential to impact people's everyday lives. This is where you come in.

How You'll Help Us Achieve It as a Product Manager

As a Product Manager at Wave Mobile Money, you will lead cross-functional teams with full ownership of your product domain. Your responsibilities include:

• Defining product goals, metrics, and roadmaps based on user needs and mission impact.
• Driving user research, especially in-market across Africa, to ensure a deep understanding of users through both in-person research and data-driven perspectives.
• Writing clear, compelling design documents and facilitating asynchronous, fast-moving decision-making.
• Over-communicating context, priorities, and decisions to ensure team alignment.
• Adjusting priorities quickly based on feedback, experiments, or new learnings.
• Solving problems holistically, whether through product features, operational tooling, or process changes.
• Championing our users and holding Wave accountable to meeting their needs.

In this Role, you'll...

• Own a product or feature holistically, including any internal tooling needed to support it.
• Relentlessly gather feedback (by talking to users and looking at data) to deeply understand the problem space and users' needs.
• Work from first principles to understand the user's biggest problems and then figure out how the product should work to solve those problems.
• Prioritize the biggest problems blocking the product's growth and impact.
• Directly manage a small product team to get improvements into users' hands in rapid iteration cycles, gather more feedback, and reach more people.

Key Details

This is a fully remote role. Candidates must be based in one of our talent hub countries (UK, Spain, USA, Canada, Kenya, and Ghana) or in one of our operating markets in Africa (Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, or Burkina Faso). Wave provides a yearly $1,200 stipend to support coworking meetups with teammates. Remote team members are expected to travel to our operational markets (e.g., Senegal or Côte d'Ivoire) at least once per quarter. Exceptions apply, but this travel is key to understanding our users and product.

Our salaries are competitive and calculated using a transparent formula. For this role, depending on your level and location, we offer a salary between $142,200 - $213,400 USD, plus a generous equity package. Major benefits include subsidised health insurance for you and your dependents, retirement contributions, 6 months of fully paid parental leave, subsidised fertility assistance, flexible vacation (21-30 days per year), and a $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 in overseeing all elements of the product development lifecycle, such as user research, design, implementation, and 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 how Wave does product and have experience working that way.
• Are a strong communicator who can inspire and lead by influence.
• Are great at coordinating across teams and excel at communicating across multiple cultures.
• Have a good nose for user-focused product design and obsess over user experience.
• Take ownership for outcomes and do whatever you can to make them close to inevitable.
• Have strong instincts for asking questions that could move the needle.
• Have the courage and persistence to replan when feedback or new information arrives.
• Always listen with empathy but ruthlessly prioritize based on impact.
• Are excited about travel and meeting users where they are—your users will be in Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, and other countries in Africa, and some travel will be essential.

About Product at Wave

Product is central to Wave, with product-minded founders leading the way. Product Managers play a vital role, impacting large segments of the company. Our processes are lightweight, guided by principles, and PMs deeply own problems end-to-end, setting goals and guiding teams toward meaningful outcomes for real people. Wave raised the largest Series A in Africa in 2021, backed by world-class investors, and is recognized on Y Combinator's top companies by revenue.

Key skills/competency

• Product Management
• User Research
• Fintech
• Mobile Money
• Sub-Saharan Africa Markets
• Cross-functional Leadership
• Product Roadmap Development
• Data-Driven Decision Making
• User Experience (UX)
• Problem Solving