Head of Product

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in South Africa.

📋 Description

• Define and take ownership of the product vision, strategy, and multi-horizon roadmap across all product lines, ensuring alignment with company OKRs and the evolving digital identity landscape.

• Convert business strategy into clear product goals, prioritized initiatives, and measurable outcomes across the entire portfolio.

• Make critical trade-off decisions across the portfolio, weighing customer value, technical feasibility, security requirements, regulatory compliance (POPIA, FICA, ISO 27001), and commercial impact.

• Guide the direction of the PI Planning process, ensuring that all product streams are well-prepared with clear features, dependencies, and objectives before each increment.

• Actively enhance iiDENTIFii’s competitive advantage through in-depth market awareness, ongoing innovation, and strategically-timed feature investment decisions.

• Maintain a structured overview of the competitive landscape, regulatory environment, and emerging standards in biometrics and digital identity.

• Lead technology forecasting for the identity and biometric sector, tracking emerging capabilities (AI-powered liveness, decentralized identity, evolving biometric standards), assessing their relevance to the roadmap, and proactively making investment recommendations before market pressures necessitate a decision.

• Identify and assess adjacent product opportunities—new verticals, geographies, and use cases—and provide board-ready recommendations regarding investment directions.

• Strengthen and develop the existing Product Office, enhancing quality, ownership, pace, and continuous improvement; scale the team as the business grows.

• Foster a culture of rigor, ownership, speed, and psychological safety within the product function.

• Establish and uphold hiring standards for product roles—define excellence, ensuring iiDENTIFii attracts and retains outstanding product talent.

• Oversee design direction and UX standards across the portfolio—setting principles, quality benchmarks, and ensuring a consistent, secure user experience.

• Mentor and nurture product talent, cultivating an environment where individuals can grow, deliver, and thrive.

• Operate as part of the senior leadership team—contributing to company strategy and cross-functional decisions beyond just the product function.

• Develop, implement, and assess clear team KPIs and OKRs to promote accountability and enhance performance continuously.

• Establish and drive structured discovery processes across the portfolio, utilizing AI tools to deepen market, customer, and competitive insights.

• Engage directly with enterprise customers, integration partners, and strategic accounts to gather requirements and validate product direction.

• Synthesize customer interviews, support trends, usage data, and commercial feedback into actionable, decision-ready product intelligence.

• Ensure continuous validation of assumptions through structured experimentation, pilots, and rapid iteration.

• Advocate for a culture of evidence-based decision-making and customer-centricity throughout the product team.

• Manage the portfolio-level backlog: ensure it is well-defined, prioritized, and properly documented across all product streams, with detailed grooming conducted by the Product Managers.

• Create clarity by articulating the significance of each initiative and specifying outcomes required to realize its value.

• Make informed trade-off decisions to address scope, priority, and dependency conflicts, including cross-team dependencies among engineering and other technical teams.

• Ensure the team consistently focuses on high-value tasks, with clear acceptance criteria and minimal ambiguity.

• Collaborate with the Head of Engineering to ensure efficient delivery of product increments within a cross-functional team structure.

• Oversee the product aspects of PI Planning at the portfolio level, ensuring that streams enter each increment with clearly defined features, dependencies, and objectives.

• Set the delivery cadence and quality standards for the product team, ensuring Product Managers effectively conduct agile ceremonies (planning, refinement, reviews, retrospectives)—delegating execution rather than managing it personally.

• Ensure feature definitions and acceptance criteria meet high standards, with detailed ownership by the Product Managers.

• Hold the team accountable to roadmap commitments while remaining adaptable to change.

• Maintain a solid understanding of iiDENTIFii’s platform—API architecture, microservices, mobile SDKs, web delivery, and data infrastructure—sufficient to make informed product decisions and engage credibly with engineering and customers.

• Collaborate with the Head of Engineering on API, SDK, and integration strategies that align with enterprise customer and partner needs.

• Treat developer-facing outputs—API guides, SDK documentation, integration resources—as essential commercial assets, ensuring they meet high standards.

• Ensure product decisions reflect a solid understanding of security, data privacy (POPIA, GDPR), and biometric data handling requirements.

• Work with engineering to guarantee that the product strategy is technically sound and operationally viable.

• Utilize AI tools as a standard, anticipated part of the role—a core professional competency, not optional.

• Apply AI to expedite market research, competitive analysis, and synthesis at a depth and speed unattainable through traditional methods.

• Use AI to draft, iterate, and refine strategic documents, PRDs, product specifications, and stakeholder communications with speed and precision.

• Leverage AI for data analysis, customer feedback synthesis, and structured decision support.

• Model AI-augmented working practices for the broader product team, embedding them into team norms.

• Develop and maintain fluency in prompt engineering; stay updated with the evolving AI tooling landscape and proactively identify opportunities for enhanced productivity.

• Manage the commercialization of products—not just their strategy and delivery: partner with the CEO, CFO, and commercial leadership on go-to-market strategies, product positioning, pricing, and commercial models.

• Collaborate with the Marketing team to drive the product marketing narrative.

• Actively participate in pre-sales technical discussions, providing product depth and credibility in engagements with enterprise customers.

• Lead win/loss analysis alongside the sales team, directly feeding commercial insights into roadmap decisions.

• Track, report on, and drive improvements in product-led growth metrics: adoption, expansion, and retention.

• Oversee the structure and execution of new feature pilots, ensuring they are designed to yield clear, actionable go/no-go evidence.

• Contribute to product reporting for investors and board members, conveying the product narrative with confidence and clarity.

• Own product positioning within the South African financial services and regtech sector, understanding the compliance requirements and buyer dynamics that influence commercial success.

• Serve as the primary product interface for internal and external stakeholders, operating with confidence, independence, and an executive presence.

• Act as the connective tissue across sales, marketing, operations, finance, customer success, and security—ensuring organizational alignment around product direction.

• Provide regular, proactive, data-driven updates to the CEO and leadership team, communicating progress, risks, and insights without prompting.

• Represent iiDENTIFii’s platform capabilities confidently in discussions with customers, partners, and investors.

• Build and sustain iiDENTIFii’s presence within the digital identity and fintech ecosystem—engaging with industry peers, standards organizations, and strategic networks to remain ahead of market shifts, surface partnerships, and position iiDENTIFii as a thought leader in biometric authentication.

• Champion iiDENTIFii’s culture, values, and mission across the product team and the broader organization.

• Cultivate a team environment defined by intellectual rigor, psychological safety, collaborative excellence, and a bias for action.

• Actively contribute to iiDENTIFii’s mission: empowering innovators in remote biometric digital authentication on a global scale.

⛳️ Requirements

• 15+ years of experience in product management, with a minimum of 8–10 years in a senior product leadership position (Head of Product, CPO, or equivalent).

• Proven track record in building, scaling, and leading product teams within technically sophisticated, fast-paced environments.

• Demonstrated success in overseeing a product portfolio from end to end, encompassing strategy, discovery, delivery, and commercial outcomes.

• Experience or strong affinity for platform/API-first products, developer tools, data products, or identity/verification technologies.

• Background in B2B/enterprise product contexts with complex stakeholder environments and integration-heavy customer relationships.

• Startup or scaleup experience is highly preferred; comfort in navigating ambiguity and limited structure is essential.

• Experience contributing to fundraising, investor narratives, or board-level product communications is a plus.

• Credible technical fluency in APIs, microservices, mobile/web development lifecycles, integrations, and cloud/data platform concepts—sufficient to engage credibly with engineering and make informed product decisions (deep hands-on engineering experience is not required).

• Understanding of security principles, enterprise-grade systems, and developer experience, including the importance of strong developer-facing documentation.

• Proven, hands-on utilization of AI tools for research, analysis, decision-making, productivity, and prompt engineering, with a mindset geared towards continuous AI adoption.

• Strong understanding of digital identity, KYC, biometrics, fintech/regtech environments, enterprise B2B product dynamics, and relevant regulatory frameworks (POPIA, FICA, GDPR).

• A degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Business, or a related field; an MBA or equivalent advanced degree is advantageous but not required if experience is substantial.

• Demonstrated history of bringing a significant new product or product category to market, from concept to commercial traction, in an enterprise or platform context.

🏝️ Benefits

• Competitive compensation package.

• Cape Town preferred; remote work is part of our culture.

• Opportunity to establish and lead a world-class product function at a globally recognized identity platform.

• Work-life balance is prioritized.

• Diverse tech stack.