Product Manager

About Greenspoon

Greenspoon is rapidly expanding as Kenya’s leading online supermarket, offering fresh, healthy groceries delivered daily to customers. We focus on providing a diverse range of organic produce, quality meats, freshly baked breads, and much more at affordable prices. Committed to sustainability as a certified B Corp, we emphasize honesty, quality, and positive impact while fostering a passionate, talented team.

Role Overview

This role is designed for early-career professionals with 2 to 4 years of experience aspiring to become product managers. You will join our product team, collaborate closely with senior product owners, and take responsibility for parts of our product suite starting in your first quarter. Our products mainly serve internal users across departments as well as customers, and the development and product strategies are handled in-house.

Key Responsibilities

• Be assigned to a product team to address real operational challenges.
• Focus on one of several areas including Inventory & Waste, Last Mile Delivery, Commercial Excellence, Scale & Compliance, or Customer Value.
• Understand the actual workflows, identify root problems behind recurring issues, translate them into clear engineering specifications, ship effective solutions, and measure impact.
• Report to a product owner and collaborate daily with an engineering squad.
• Engage directly with the operational environment to gather insights.
• Create concise, clear problem statements and technical specs.
• Prioritize the backlog based on rationale, manage it effectively.
• Use AI tools to prototype internal solutions and conduct self-analyses to speed up iterations.
• Ensure solutions are adopted and used by teams; investigate low adoption and address causes.

Candidate Profile

• 2 to 4 years experience in demanding roles, potentially developers wanting to focus on product, operations professionals, data analysts, consultants, or versatile startup employees.
• Technical literacy including ability to read SQL, draft data models, follow engineering discussions, and evaluate trade-offs.
• Experience independently fixing issues, creating reliable reports, automating manual processes, or improving failing workflows.
• Understanding of product team dynamics emphasizing problem discovery, solution testing, and delivery in sequence.
• Inquisitive mindset focused on root causes behind data anomalies instead of quick fixes.
• Comfortable working across diverse stakeholders like warehouse supervisors, riders, and engineers.
• Commercial awareness linking features to margins, availability, capital, or retention.
• Ability to make decisions with incomplete data, favoring timely solutions over waiting for perfect information.
• Modest and collaborative attitude, willing to learn and work early hours on site as needed.

Success Factors

• Measured on outcomes rather than outputs and ability to build consensus on what is right and used.
• Cynical of stated requirements alone, emphasizing on-the-ground observation and questioning.
• Skilled in clear, brief writing to convey problems and solutions with relevant evidence and targets.
• Able to say no and justify prioritization decisions.
• Commitment to closing feedback loops by validating shipped solutions and sharing results transparently.
• Maintaining close engagement with operational teams beyond initial learning phase.

Additional Information

If you are a developer considering this role, note that it involves significantly more writing and coordination than coding. You will propose ideas and specs that others build, focusing on impactful problem solving over technical implementation. After a year, you may fully own a product area and be recognized by operations teams as the expert point of contact, having successfully shipped valuable improvements and moved key metrics.

Do not apply if you:

• Prefer having plans handed to you rather than owning problem discovery and backlog management.
• Want to continue coding yourself rather than focusing on product leadership.
• Think product management is about managing people—this role offers influence without direct reports.
• Prefer thoroughness over timely delivery; we value delivering good fixes promptly and iterating later.