Position Overview 

At Educate!, the Senior Product Associate will play a crucial role in driving user research, product experimentation, and continuous improvement to meet the needs of Africa’s youth. This role combines hands-on experimentation, ensuring that all product development efforts align with Educate!’s long-term mission of transforming education for millions of youth across Africa. The successful candidate will collaborate with cross-functional teams to lead user-centered validations, develop frameworks for experimentation, and optimize product development processes.

The Educate! Experience is currently impacting 32,000 youth in Ugandan secondary schools and is Educate!s most mature product. Within the context of this product we continuously seek to maintain and deepen our impact whilst also conducting research and development initiatives that benefit other Educate! Products. The Senior Product Associate will play a pivotal role in ensuring data-driven insights are available to guide the product team in strategic decisions and inform product improvements. The Senior Product Associate will be trusted to define the plan and execute against a discrete feature component or workstream with minimal managerial direction. In addition, they support knowledge management and knowledge exchange across products to ensure insights from EXP inform other products. By supporting product leaders in building high-impact, user-driven products, this role is central to Educate!’s mission of creating educational solutions that drive meaningful change.

The ideal candidate will recognize this as their core skills set: 

• Customer-Centric Approach: Bring a deep understanding of user needs, leveraging feedback and insights to continuously refine product offerings. They should be excited about interacting with youth and driven by a sense of curiosity to deeply understand their needs and opportunities to set them up for success. 
• Collaborative and Team-Oriented: This role requires seamless collaboration with product leaders, designers, programs implementation teams and other key stakeholders. The candidate must excel in fostering a positive, cross-functional work environment, driving alignment across teams, and proactively manage a small set of working relationships independently, particularly with the LX Designer, the product strategist and the implementation lead.
• Clear Communication: Strong written and verbal communication skills are essential. The candidate must effectively translate complex product ideas and insights into actionable plans for both technical and non-technical teams.
• Project Management, Problem-Solving, and Innovation: The ideal candidate should demonstrate strong project management capabilities to drive the successful end-to-end implementation of experiments. They must be skilled at identifying obstacles and devising solutions that ensure efficient product iterations and timely delivery.
• Analytical and Data-Driven: The candidate should possess a strong data analysis skill set and analytical mindset, comfortable with cleaning, analyzing, and interpreting complex data to derive actionable insights. Familiarity with data analytics tools and experimentation methodologies is crucial for informed decision-making.

What You’ll Do🌟 

Lead end-to-end project management and execution of experiments and continuous discovery against EXP product roadmap

• Design and Manage Experiment Implementation: Lead the end-to-end project management and execution of experiments within the product team to validate hypotheses and improve the user experience, ensuring alignment with product goals.
• Utilize the Sandbox Process: Drive the use of the sandbox environment within the team to prototype, test, and validate product features in a controlled, low-risk setting.
• Define Metrics and KPIs: Collaborate with the product team to establish clear metrics and KPIs for each experiment, ensuring they align with both immediate and long-term product objectives.
• Document and Share Insights: Maintain comprehensive documentation of experiment outcomes and share key learnings within the team to continuously optimize future experimentation efforts in and beyond EXP. 

Increase the EXP impact unit capability to rapidly test and iterate while running a product at scale 

• Co-Create Experimentation Frameworks: Collaborate with the product team and product ops function to adapt and apply standardized experimentation frameworks (e.g., A/B testing, multivariate testing, and rapid prototyping) to fit the specific needs of the product.
• Provide Tools and Resources: Leverage the tools, resources, and processes rolled out by the product operations function to streamline experimentation within the product team.
• Enhance Methodologies: Work with the product team to continuously assess and refine experimentation methodologies, ensuring they are aligned with best practices and the product’s unique requirements.
• Support Team Training: Co-create training and resources with the product operations function to empower the product team in utilizing experimentation frameworks effectively for product development.

Facilitate feedback loops from youth and frontline teams to enhance product design and delivery 

• Lead User Research: Conduct usability testing, user interviews, and other research efforts to validate product assumptions and gain insights into user needs.
• Synthesize Feedback: Analyze user feedback and data to provide actionable insights that inform product improvements.
• Integrate Insights Continuously: Ensure that user insights are regularly incorporated into the product development process to drive ongoing refinement.
• Advocate for Users: Champion user-centered design solutions in product discussions and iterations to ensure the product aligns with user needs.
• Collaborate on Feedback Integration: Work with the product team to establish efficient processes for transforming frontline feedback into actionable backlog items, ensuring this feedback is prioritized and integrated into future product iterations.
• Collaborate closely with LX designers to co-design prototypes, ensuring user insights are rapidly translated into testable concepts.

Driving Data-Driven Insights to inform product strategy

• Conduct Data Analysis, Monitor KPIs, and Formulate Strategic Recommendations: Lead the cleaning, analysis, and interpretation of quantitative and qualitative data and support the tracking of key performance indicators (KPIs) to assess product efficiency, quality, and impact. This includes formulating clear, evidence-based recommendations for feature direction and advocating for a defined position during strategic decision-making.
• Support Feature Prioritization: Assist the product strategist in prioritizing and implementing frontline-driven features, collaborating with the team to streamline the feedback loop and reduce the cycle time from insight capture to feature release.
• Facilitate Continuous Improvement: Participate in regular retrospectives and reviews to optimize the integration of feedback into product development, helping to refine experimentation practices and ensure that product improvements are consistently aligned with user needs.

Who You Are 🦸‍♀️🦸‍♂️

• 3-5 years in product management, operations, or related fields with a focus on experimentation and user-centered design.
• Skills: Proven project management abilities, strong data analysis skills, analytical mindset, strong communication abilities, and a solid understanding of experimentation tools and methodologies.
• Attributes: Collaborative, data-driven, and proactive, with a passion for driving user-focused product improvements.
• Informal Leadership: Demonstrate informal leadership by serving as a visible technical resource for others on the team, and may be asked to mentor or onboard junior associates.
• Dynamic experience is highly preferred, and can operate well in complex and fast-changing environments.
• The ideal candidate has worked in a very early-stage startup trying to achieve product-market fit or led a new product or program within a larger organization.
• Experience working with diverse stakeholders and managing many priorities
• Passion for Educate!’s mission is a must, but past work in education or youth development is not required. We value diverse perspectives and encourage applications from people with various backgrounds. Background working with youth in the informal sector would be an asset.
• Fits our Five Culture Tenets (see What is Educate! About? below); Learn more by looking at Educate!’s culture deck here 

What We Offer 

• A vibrant, mission-driven environment with a supportive and fun team. 
• Competitive salary based on experience.
• Learning & growth opportunities  

Application Process: Rolling basis, interviews happening soon!

Terms 

• Location is Kampala, Uganda

Enveritas builds solutions to improve the measure of sustainability in agricultural supply chains and include smallholder farmers in responsibly sourced agricultural products, in particular coffee and cocoa. A key component of this requires developing and financing projects that directly improve sustainability of production and benefit the livelihoods of smallholder farmers. 

We are a dynamic non-profit organization working across 34 coffee and cocoa growing countries around the world, with a remote-first environment. We bring together tech and machine learning with rigorous field processes to collect and process data on supply chain sustainability and environmental impact. This is made possible by a hard working and diverse team that is dedicated to delivering impact to smallholder farmers and developing more sustainable coffee and cocoa supply chains. 

Summary  

Enveritas is looking for exceptional talent to join our team in Uganda. This role will be responsible for coordinating impact projects and on-the-ground data collection in Uganda. We are looking for a self-driven, operationally-minded, detailed-oriented, and analytical individual with more than 4 years of professional experience, including time spent in project and stakeholder management. More specifically, this individual must have experience carrying out detailed operational tasks, coordinating teams to successfully deliver against objectives, synthesizing insights from large datasets, and proactively identifying opportunities for improvement. We are looking for someone who is a doer and a problem solver, has a high degree of ownership towards the quality of his/her work, and has the potential to take on increasing responsibility both on project coordination and data and outcomes analysis.

You will support Impact-related efforts in Uganda, focusing on (1) project rollout and operational coordination, (2) on-the-ground data collection, quality control, and analysis and (3) management of implementing partners and stakeholders. 

The position is full-time. You will be based in Uganda, with travel to rural coffee regions, mostly in Central and Eastern Uganda. You will report to a small team of international and regional staff and have the backing of a global team with deep experience in sustainability, technology, operations, and stakeholder management.

Key Responsibilities 

Operational Oversight and Partner Management

• Oversee the operational execution and day-to-day management of in-country impact interventions (e.g., including coordinating logistics, liaising with local leaders and overseeing interactions with farmers in rural coffee regions)
• Oversee and provide guidance to implementing partner team members 
• Proactively identify opportunities for process improvements and drive continuous optimization
• Monitor project progress, identify and resolve issues, and provide regular status updates to stakeholders, Uganda country leadership and Impact team
• Communicate regularly to Enveritas’ Impact and Operations teams to ensure continuous improvement of solutions and timely delivery of projects
• Help build connections with national and regional stakeholders or implementing partners, including government, exporters, farmers’ organizations, NGOs, and research institutes
• Help coordinate local government compliance for on-the-ground operations
• Support other operational tasks in Uganda as needed

Impact support and data analysis 

• Support the design and roll-out of data collection tools (e.g., surveys) and training programs
• Build knowledge on coffee agronomy in Uganda
• Develop and customize training materials and provide training to implementing partner field staff
• Run analyses on the data collected at the same time as tracking key project indicators (preferred experience with Excel) 
• Monitor the quality of data collected daily, synthesize insights and report results to the Impact team
• Develop presentations for key in-country stakeholders

Required qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Economics, Computer Science, Mathematics, Agriculture or related fields
• 4+ years of experience including in project management and stakeholder management, preferably with some rural / agricultural focus 
• Willingness to travel and work in rural areas and willingness to work outside of normal hours during more intense periods 
• Strong analytical skills and experience with quantitative data analysis to drive decision-making
• Familiarity with data analytics tools and/or demonstrated ability to learn quickly (e.g. Excel, Looker, other business intelligence software) 
• Excellent verbal and written proficiency in English and one local language
• Proactive and able to take ownership to drive forward work with limited oversight
• Passion for sustainable economic rural development 
• Positive attitude and integrity

Preferred qualifications:

• Knowledge of agriculture and/or sustainable farming practices
• Experience with primary data collection (survey design, processing of survey data)
• Experience with monitoring and evaluation of agricultural development projects 

How to Apply

Please apply via our Greenhouse job posting. Feel free to contact us at jobs@enveritas.org should you have any questions about the position or the interview process. Questions about this opportunity or process will not reflect negatively on your application.

We care deeply about diversity. Our work is complex and nuanced, so the more diversity we have in the voices working on our problems, the larger of an impact our work can have for the world. Enveritas is an Equal Opportunity Employer ​encouraging an inclusive and diverse workforce. We embrace and celebrate the unique experiences, perspectives, and cultural backgrounds that each individual brings to the workplace. We are dedicated to hiring employees who reflect the communities we serve and strongly encourage qualified candidates from all backgrounds to apply.​

A few notes about our communications: We are not able to reply to messages sent to staff outside of either our application process or our jobs email address, as this is unfair to other candidates. Also, Enveritas has been made aware of fake job postings by individuals pretending to hire persons seeking employment. These individuals are looking to collect personal information about you for fraudulent purposes. All legitimate Enveritas job openings are posted under https://enveritas.org/jobs/ and all recruiting emails from Enveritas team members will come from @enveritas.org.