About the Role

Why this role exists

Across Africa, school fees are the biggest reason children miss school. Parents want the best for their children — but education is expensive, seasonal, and unpredictable. We believe financial access shouldn’t determine who gets to learn.

So we’re building it.

Zeraki is developing the financial infrastructure layer for African education — payments, savings, installments, lending, and insurance built directly into the everyday school experience.

This isn’t a feature-factory PM role. It’s for someone who wants to architect how Africa finances education for the next decade.

Requirements

What you'll do

As Product Manager, Embedded Finance, you will own the full lifecycle of financial products — from discovery to partner negotiations to product build to GTM to post-launch growth.

You will:

1. Lead Product Strategy for Embedded Finance

• Shape a roadmap that transforms affordability and access to education across Africa
• Combine data, user insight, UX psychology, and financial logic to prioritize sustainably
• Identify the highest-leverage opportunities that accelerate adoption, trust, and retention

2. Build and scale financial products — payments, installments, savings, insurance

• Design solutions from first principles: flows, states, edge cases, fallback logic
• Set Definition of Ready / Definition of Done and own Product Owner responsibilities during delivery
• Work daily with engineering to unblock ambiguity and keep delivery predictable
• Drive first-time-use UX clarity — parents should never feel confused or unsafe when handling money

3. Drive Partner Success and Accountability

• Evaluate and select FSPs (banks, microfinance institutions, insurers, KYC vendors)
• Negotiate APIs, SLAs, commercial structures, and support responsibilities
• Hold partners accountable for reliability, latency, settlement, and ticket turnaround times

4. Launch with operational maturity — not wishful thinking

• Prepare comms, CX scripts, FAQs, escalation paths, fallback plans, and monitoring dashboards
• Run readiness gates: no launch without support and visibility in place
• Scale safely and iteratively — not through big-bang drops

5. Own business outcomes, not feature output

• Track funnel conversion, retries, settlement disputes, claims success, retention
• Move metrics every sprint — not every quarter
• Decide when to iterate, scale, or stop based on real data

Product Managers

• Have led a module, feature rollout, or product area end-to-end
• Comfortable turning chaos into structured, actionable plans
• Proven track record of shipping solutions tied to measurable outcomes
• Experience gathering user insights and connecting product work to real business metrics

What success looks like in this role

Within 12 months:

• Parents complete financial flows confidently in one session
• Support tickets trend down because the product just works
• Embedded Finance becomes a measurable driver of retention and LTV
• Partnerships are productive and accountable — not optimistic and vague
• Engineering reports predictable delivery and reduced ambiguity
• You are seen internally as the go-to person for building value at scale

Ideal experience:

• 3–8+ years in Product Management for SaaS, fintech, payments, insurance, lending, wallets, or mobile money
• Experience shipping complex, multi-stakeholder, API-or workflow-heavy products
• Ownership of products through strategy → build → launch → GTM → scale
• Experience working with banks, mobile money providers, insurers, credit-risk partners, or KYC/KYB vendors (advantage)

You might be a fit if this sounds like you:

• You think in systems, constraints, and sequencing, not ideas for their own sake
• You feel responsible for outcomes, not tickets shipped
• Ambiguity doesn’t intimidate you — it energizes you
• You can give engineers exact clarity, and give users exact trust
• You’d rather ship something meaningful in 30 days than debate features for 6 months
• You care about scaling impact in education, not just scaling revenue

If you want to build the finance layer that makes school affordable for millions of families, this is absolutely the place.

What to include with your application

Send your CV and portfolio/case studies that demonstrate:

• Products you owned end-to-end
• Complex / regulated launches you managed
• Product artifacts you created (flows, PRDs, rollout plans, live dashboards, GTM experiments)
• A story of a time you increased adoption or completion — not just shipped features

Why this role matters

If you do this job well, education becomes more accessible, more equitable, and less frightening for families across Africa. You won’t just launch features. You’ll reshape how schools and parents finance education across the continent.

• Shape a roadmap that transforms affordability and access to education across Africa
• Combine data, user insight, UX psychology, and financial logic to prioritize sustainably
• Identify the highest-leverage opportunities that accelerate adoption, trust, and retention
• Design solutions from first principles: flows, states, edge cases, fallback logic
• Set Definition of Ready / Definition of Done and own Product Owner responsibilities during delivery
• Work daily with engineering to unblock ambiguity and keep delivery predictable
• Drive first-time-use UX clarity — parents should never feel confused or unsafe when handling money
• Evaluate and select FSPs (banks, microfinance institutions, insurers, KYC vendors)
• Negotiate APIs, SLAs, commercial structures, and support responsibilities
• Hold partners accountable for reliability, latency, settlement, and ticket turnaround times
• Prepare comms, CX scripts, FAQs, escalation paths, fallback plans, and monitoring dashboards
• Run readiness gates: no launch without support and visibility in place
• Scale safely and iteratively — not through big-bang drops
• Track funnel conversion, retries, settlement disputes, claims success, retention
• Move metrics every sprint — not every quarter
• Decide when to iterate, scale, or stop based on real data

• Product Strategy
• Product Development
• Financial Product Management
• User Insight Gathering
• UX Psychology
• API Negotiation
• SLA Management
• Cross-functional Collaboration
• Data Analysis
• Problem Solving
• Systems Thinking
• Agile Methodologies

• Proven track record of shipping solutions tied to measurable outcomes
• Experience gathering user insights and connecting product work to real business metrics
• Experience working with banks, mobile money providers, insurers, credit-risk partners, or KYC/KYB vendors (advantage)