Head of Product, Merchant Solutions (SMME)

How to Apply: Visit the application link provided on this page to submit your application through Safaricom Kenya's Oracle Cloud recruitment portal.

Proving Merchant Payments Depth Before You Lead the Portfolio

This is a senior product leadership role where Safaricom will screen hard for real merchant payments economics, not just product management tenure. Your CV and interviews need to show you have moved merchant activation, acceptance, or credit attach numbers in an African market.

1. Lead with merchant outcomes, not feature lists: Your CV should open each product role with the commercial metric you moved, such as active merchant growth, acceptance volume, or credit attach rate. Safaricom's roadmap is tied to active merchants, usage, revenue, and credit attach, so mirror that language. Replace phrases like 'managed product backlog' with 'grew active merchants from X to Y across micro and small segments'. Quantify the denominator you used so the panel sees you understand merchant metrics.

2. Show you can activate before you build: The posting explicitly prioritises getting merchants to use existing products before building new ones. Prepare a story where you ran structured experiments on onboarding, configuration, or engagement and held a team to measurable movement. Explain how you decided to fix a funnel rather than ship a new feature. Interviewers will probe whether you can resist shiny new builds when the data says activation is the bottleneck.

3. Master the economics of acceptance and settlement: Be ready to discuss pricing, settlement cycles, reconciliation pain points, and merchant lifecycle stages in detail. If you have worked with till, Buy Goods, Paybill, or QR acceptance, map exactly what you owned versus what engineering or operations owned. The panel will test whether you can speak credibly about interchange, float, and merchant working capital without hand-waving.

4. Bring a single merchant identity story: The role calls for driving a single merchant identity and common data model across products. Prepare an example where you unified fragmented merchant data or platforms, and explain the trade-offs you made across markets. Show how you balanced local market needs with reusable foundations that other countries could adopt. This is a key screen for multi-market product leaders.

5. Demonstrate data fluency with specifics: You do not need to be a SQL engineer, but you must show comfort defining metrics, working with analysts, and reading SQL outputs. Describe a time you instrumented a merchant journey and changed a roadmap decision based on the data. Name the metrics you tracked and how you set the denominator. Avoid vague claims like 'data-driven'; give the actual experiment design and result.

6. Prepare for regulator and vendor conversations: The role involves CBK regulation, data protection, vendor contracts, and data rights. Have a concise example of navigating a regulatory constraint or negotiating a vendor agreement where IP and reuse across markets mattered. Show you can influence group functions, partners, and regulators without direct authority. The panel will listen for how you balance commercial speed with compliance and data rights.

7. Build a 90-day merchant activation plan: Come to the interview with a rough first-90-days approach for the merchant stack. Start with diagnosing activation gaps across micro, small, and medium segments, then propose two or three experiments on onboarding or configuration. Show how you would set the product operating rhythm, from discovery to post-launch review. This signals you think like an owner, not a roadmap administrator.

8. Show you can lead senior product talent: With at least four years leading product teams or a portfolio, you will be assessed on how you build and coach PMs. Prepare examples of setting product practice, running discovery and PRD reviews, and raising the bar on written communication. Safaricom expects excellent written and verbal communication, including presenting to executives. Bring a sample of a crisp strategy memo or PRD structure you have used to align senior stakeholders.