Position Overview

At Educate!, we create and deliver learning experiences reshaping what youth employment looks like across Africa — building products that reach hundreds of thousands of young people in Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, and Tanzania. As a Product Strategist, you will own a product or priority feature end to end — its strategy, its learning agenda, its design quality, and the team that makes it happen. 

The Educate! Experience is Educate!’s most mature product, impacting 36,000 youth annually and serving as a critical R&D lab for the entire organization. As the Product Lead, you will own the end-to-end product strategy and the learning agenda required to sustain impact at scale. This senior role demands an evidence-driven approach to navigate the complex trade-offs inherent in a large-scale delivery model, ensuring the product continues to evolve as a rigorous and impactful solution.

You will manage a team of designers and/or product associate(s), run stage retreats, and navigate a rich stakeholder landscape — from youth and frontline teams to impact unit leaders and senior leadership. You will work in close partnership with a senior product leader and business unit leader, and across functional leaders in design, metrics, and implementation. You will have the mandate to build something rigorous, evidence-based, and deeply connected to the people you are designing for.

Expected Impact

• Uphold product quality in Educate!’s most mature product by maintaining a coherent product strategy and LX design to consistently measurably impact 36,000 youth
• Contribute to a constructive and healthy team culture in the wider EXP impact unit and frontline teams by advancing co-creation, effective collaboration and simplified product design 
• Produce credible and actionable insights on agency/growth mindset interventions through well-executed experiments and continuous discovery 
• Maintain a strong product team in EXP and facilitate growth for designers, training experts and product associate. 
• Lead with evidence informed proposals for the future of EXP.

What You’ll Do🌟

Develop and execute EXP Product Strategy to measurably impact 36,000 youth annually 

• Lead the process of developing EXP's stage strategy — generating the evidence, analysis, and options that inform the  investment memo and enable well-grounded Investment Committee decisions — within the strategic direction and priorities set by the business unit leader; maintain critical strategy artefacts that keep the team and leadership aligned
• Lead stage retreats and quarterly planning cycles, surfacing key strategic issues, trade-offs, and product-level priorities for the business unit leader and/or Product Director to shape and approve
• Own and iteratively update the product's core strategy artefacts — value proposition, theory of change, lean canvas, user persona, skills map, graduation criteria, product risk register, and product roadmap — in response to evaluation findings, user evidence, and organisational learning; raise strategic implications to the Director with options, not just problems
• Proactively identify when strategic assumptions need to be revisited; bring these to the Product Director or business unit leader with evidence and a clear set of options, and drive agreed decisions through the team once direction is set
• Own LX strategy for the product in partnership with the functional design leader or senior designer; ensure strategic intent is clearly expressed in experience design decisions and measurable outcomes
• Own the gender equity and safeguarding strategies for EXP in alignment with organisational standards
• [new] Develop and own the cost-per-youth (CPY) narrative — modelling investment options and scenarios that connect product decisions to impact and financial sustainability; calibrate feature investment against scale targets and financial reality; prepare material for the Investment Committee
• Own the full product strategy budget; participate in high-level Budget vs. Actual reviews for CPY under the leadership of the MD
• Own the product dashboard; ensure it reflects the right metrics and is actively used in decision-making across the team

 Build a high performing product team that is well-embedded in the impact unit

• Manage, coach, and develop the EXP design officer and Senior Product Associate — setting clear performance expectations, running regular 1:1s, and identifying growth paths for strong performers
• Lead team habits and meetings — including sprint planning, check-ins, retrospectives, retreats— in ways that embed learning, accountability, and iteration into how the team works day to day
• Raise and resolve team capacity with functional leaders and product director, sequencing, and workload challenges proactively, so the team maintains momentum and quality in their work
• Support the EXP training Coordinator through technical guidance, clear communication of standards and regular collaborative reviews of training quality vs LX requirements. 
• Lead hiring and onboarding for the product team; ensure new team members understand the product strategy, learning agenda, and ways of working from day one
• Conduct performance reviews and manage performance decisions within the team in line with Educate!'s processes; flag concerns early and follow through on development commitments

Position EXP as a R&D lab for growth mindset/agency and product excellence (Discovery and Experimentation)

• Set and own the product's learning agenda — defining what must be learned at each stage, how evidence will be generated, and how findings feed into decisions; design and maintain structured mechanisms to capture feedback from youth and frontline teams throughout the development cycle, not only during formal evaluation
• Design and oversee the evaluation plan for the product; ensure pilots, experiments, and research activities are executed well and synthesised into clear, actionable findings
• Maintain a coherent, decision-useful data architecture — ensuring data from feature experiments, monitoring systems, and evaluations is structured, documented, and usable across the team; monitor feature performance and draw real-time insights to inform day-to-day decisions and flag risks or gaps to the Director
• Own the full suite of product builds — curriculum, training manuals, LX blueprint, lesson timetables, assessment tools, event guidelines, and artwork for print — finalised to standard and on schedule
• Validate design decisions against CPY constraints and the delivery model before finalising; escalate when design ambitions exceed cost or delivery constraints
• Maintain a structured feedback loop with the HoPI; conduct periodic check-ins during implementation to monitor gaps between design intent and frontline reality
• Hold the LX designer and design partners accountable to agreed experience quality standards — ensuring design decisions visibly express the product's strategic intent and theory of change
• Oversee documentation of insights and learnings through Confluence and other team tools, building institutional memory and enabling consistent decision-making across the team

Establish full impact unit alignment and ensure product design eases implementation through effective stakeholder management

• Involve key stakeholders — including youth, trainers, impact unit leaders, the MD and functional partners — in setting and validating product direction; maintain their understanding of and alignment with the product strategy
• Manage alignment at the product and feature level — resolving misalignments across design, evidence, and impact before they become blockers; flag when product-level decisions have implications that exceed the Product Lead's scope and require the Director or business unit leader to weigh in
• Manage upward proactively: keep the Director, business unit leader, and MD informed of product progress, risks, and trade-offs; create structured opportunities for strategic input and maintain alignment on how product decisions connect to the business unit leader's priorities, payer strategy, and organisational direction
• Ensure cross-functional workstreams — with impact unit, LX, metrics, and implementation teams — execute coherently and in line with product priorities; coordinate workstream leads and support leadership meetings as needed
• Represent the product clearly in organisational forums, planning cycles, and leadership conversations; maintain accountability for the product area even as organisational priorities shift

Who You Are 🦸‍♀️🦸‍♂️ 

• 7–10 years of experience in product management, programme leadership, or a closely related role — with a track record of independently owning strategy process and evidence generation, not just executing against a plan set by others
• Demonstrated experience defining a clear product vision or impact thesis and translating it into a phased product strategy, execution roadmap, and experimentation plan — with evidence of data-driven iteration and pivoting in response to performance metrics or changing market conditions.
• Proven ability to navigate dynamic environments such as NGOs, social enterprises, or fast-moving teams; comfortable making high-stakes decisions under ambiguity and incomplete information
• Strong command of lean startup methods, design thinking, and agile approaches — able to apply and adapt these to context, and model them for a team
• Experience managing, coaching, and developing a team of product or programme practitioners; able to build a culture of learning, accountability, and honest feedback
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills; able to synthesise diverse evidence sources — qualitative, quantitative, and evaluative — and translate findings into strategic recommendations
• Solid experience with user research methods such as surveys, interviews, prototyping, or data analysis; able to design research that answers the right strategic questions, not just collect data
• Demonstrated ability to lead cross-functional coordination and manage complex stakeholder relationships, including upward management to senior leadership and business unit leaders
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to make a product's strategy, evidence base, and trade-offs legible to diverse audiences
• Demonstrated empathy and curiosity to understand diverse user needs, especially those of marginalised or underserved populations
• Passion for Educate!'s mission of creating transformative experiences for youth, with a commitment to continuous learning and improvement
• Fits our Five Cultural Tenets (see What is Educate! About? below); Learn more by looking at Educate!’s culture deck here