Product Manager Connectivity Services at Vodafone Global Enterprise

Role purpose:

• The Product Manager represents the business stakeholders and is the voice of the customer guiding an individual squad for a particular business purpose. You will bring knowledge, insight, and leadership across the product lifecycle, taking the lead in identifying market trends and ensuring specific product lines within the connectivity portfolio of Vodacom Business Africa (VBA) address these trends.  Because the Product team is at the forefront of enabling sales to engage customers with our value propositions, the Product Manager will therefore be responsible for managing the lifecycle of a set of Fixed and Mobile Enterprise connectivity, Unified Communications (UC) products and services across multiple African markets. This will be achieved by taking to market, and subsequently managing in-life, the product set, and associated management services that meet the businesses strategic and commercial requirements.

Your responsibilities will include:

• Own, define, document and agree, with key stakeholders, a product plan that identifies the market landscape, competitor analysis, product scope and performance, business objectives and strategy, the customer experience, growth plan and roadmap for the product sets. 
• Working with other business stakeholders, create and own market requirements specifications and business cases for the products. Responsible for taking services through the product development process.
• Accountable for the overall product lifecycle management, covering product performance management, cost optimization, maintaining high calibre product collateral and training materials, supporting product marketing and Public Relations (PR) activities, product innovation, product evolution and feature enhancements, cost optimization and sunset rationalisation.
• Managing key stakeholders across the value stream, both internal to VBA, and across other Vodacom Group Operating Companies (OPCOs), as well as external suppliers and channel partners.
• Maximising value by delivering the product vision, defining the epics and user stories and prioritising the product backlog of the squad and accepting deliverables at the end of each sprint. 
• Responsible for defining and tracking Objective Key Results (OKRs) and KPIs as part of the quarterly business reviews (QBR) process

The ideal candidate for this role will have:
Must have technical/professional qualifications: 

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Electronics Engineering, or a Bachelor of Commerce in a Commercially related field.
• Holding network and service management certifications (e.g., ITIL, Cisco, Huawei, Juniper, VMware) is a plus.
• Holding agile product/project management qualification (e.g., SCRUM, SAFE) is a plus.
• A minimum of 5 years proven track record in product development, product management.

Core competencies, knowledge and experience :

• 5 years+ relevant professional experience in product development and management in Enterprise ICT environments.
• Professional experience and knowledge of the Telecommunications industry as a whole, working on Managed Connectivity products and Services such as; GSM, WANs (MPLSs, SD-WAN) Internet, Wired/Wireless Access technologies, Ethernet, Wired/Wireless LANs, SIP and Unified Communications are strongly preferred.
• Knowledge of SDN/NFV market context and SDWAN vendors and technical aspects is a strong plus.
• Broad knowledge of enterprise requirements/challenges within domestic and international markets, infrastructure technologies, commercials and operations.
• Strong communications skills, comfortable interfacing with different audiences of varied levels of seniority

Closing date for Applications: 08 March 2023