Head of Product

ROLE PURPOSE

This role owns iiDENTIFii’s Product Office and the multiple product streams within it. It is deliberately dual: you operate as a strategic product leader — owning the vision, portfolio and commercial trajectory across iiDENTIFii’s two core product lines, Digital Identity (DI) and Identity & Verification (IDV) — while remaining hands-on in the craft: writing PRDs, running discovery, and staying close to the detail. You will lead and build at the same time. As the business grows, the scope and title of this role may grow with it.

This is a senior leadership role reporting directly to the CEO, with full ownership of the Product Office — today spanning Product Management, Design/UX and Product Ops, with the product marketing narrative driven jointly with the Marketing team. It is a high-autonomy, high-accountability role: you will operate with significant independence, make consequential decisions at pace, and set the standard for product excellence. Operating in a technically sophisticated, security-sensitive biometric identity domain, the role demands strong product leadership, credible technical fluency, executive presence, and a native comfort with AI tools as everyday instruments of the trade.

The Head of Product owns the “why, what and when” across both product lines: translating company strategy into a coherent, evidence-based portfolio for Digital Identity (DI) and Identity & Verification (IDV), setting the cadence and quality of delivery, and acting as the connective tissue that keeps engineering, sales, marketing and operations aligned around a shared product direction.

ROLE TASKS AND RESPONSIBILITIES

Product Strategy & Portfolio Leadership

• Define and own the product vision, strategy, and multi-horizon roadmap across all product lines, aligned to company OKRs and the evolving digital identity landscape
• Translate business strategy into clear product goals, prioritised initiatives, and measurable outcomes across the full portfolio
• Make high-stakes trade-off decisions across the portfolio, balancing customer value, technical feasibility, security requirements, regulatory and security compliance (POPIA, FICA, ISO 27001), and commercial impact
• Set the direction for the PI Planning process, ensuring all product streams enter each increment well-prepared with clear features, dependencies, and objectives
• Actively widen iiDENTIFii’s competitive moat through deep market awareness, continuous innovation, and well-timed feature investment decisions
• Maintain a structured view of the competitive landscape, regulatory environment, and emerging standards in biometrics and digital identity
• Lead technology forecasting for the identity and biometric space, tracking emerging capabilities (AI-powered liveness, decentralised identity, evolving biometric standards), evaluating their relevance to the roadmap, and making proactive investment recommendations before the market forces the decision
• Identify and evaluate adjacent product opportunities — new verticals, geographies and use cases — and make board-ready recommendations on where to invest

Team Leadership, Culture & Executive Presence

• Lead and develop the existing Product Office, raising the bar on quality, ownership, pace and continuous improvement; scale the team over time as the business grows
• Build a culture of rigour, ownership, speed and psychological safety across the product function
• Set and uphold the hiring bar for product roles — define what great looks like, and ensure iiDENTIFii attracts and retains exceptional product talent
• Own design direction and UX standards across the portfolio — establishing principles, quality benchmarks, and a consistent, secure user experience
• Coach and develop product talent, creating an environment where people grow, deliver and thrive
• Operate as a member of the senior leadership team — contributing to company strategy and cross-functional decisions, not just the product function
• Develop, implement and measure clear team KPIs and OKRs to drive accountability and continuously uplift performance

Discovery, Research & Customer Insight

• Establish and drive structured discovery processes across the portfolio, using AI tools to accelerate the depth and breadth of market, customer and competitive insight
• Engage directly with enterprise customers, integration partners and strategic accounts to surface requirements and validate product direction
• Synthesise customer interviews, support trends, usage data and commercial feedback into actionable, decision-ready product intelligence
• Ensure continuous assumption validation through structured experimentation, pilots and rapid iteration
• Champion a culture of evidence-based decision-making and customer-centricity throughout the product team

Backlog Ownership & Prioritisation

• Own the portfolio-level backlog: ensure it is well-defined, prioritised and clearly documented across all product streams, with the detailed grooming owned by the Product Managers
• Create clarity by defining why each initiative matters and what specific outcomes must be achieved to realise its value
• Make informed trade-off decisions to resolve scope, priority and dependency conflicts, including cross-team dependencies across engineering and other technical teams
• Ensure the team is always working on the highest-value work, with clear acceptance criteria and minimal ambiguity

Delivery & Execution

• Partner with the Head of Engineering to ensure product increments are delivered efficiently within a cross-functional team structure
• Own the product side of PI Planning at portfolio level, ensuring streams enter each increment with clear features, dependencies and objectives
• Set the delivery cadence and quality standard for the product team, and ensure the Product Managers run agile ceremonies (planning, refinement, reviews, retrospectives) effectively — delegating execution rather than running it personally
• Ensure feature definition and acceptance criteria meet a high bar, with the detail owned by the Product Managers
• Hold the team to roadmap commitments while remaining adaptable to change

Technical Product Leadership

• Maintain a sound understanding of iiDENTIFii’s platform — API architecture, microservices, mobile SDKs, web delivery and data infrastructure — sufficient to make good product decisions and engage credibly with engineering and customers
• Partner with the Head of Engineering on API, SDK and integration direction that meets enterprise customer and partner needs
• Treat developer-facing outputs — API guides, SDK documentation, integration resources — as first-class commercial assets, ensuring they meet a high standard
• Ensure product decisions reflect a sound understanding of security, data privacy (POPIA, GDPR) and biometric data handling requirements
• Work with engineering to ensure the product strategy is technically sound and operationally viable

AI-Augmented Ways of Working

• Use AI tools as a standard, expected part of the role — a core professional competency, not optional
• Apply AI to accelerate market research, competitive analysis and synthesis at a depth and speed not achievable through traditional methods
• Use AI to draft, iterate and refine strategic documents, PRDs, product specs 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 and embed them into team norms
• Develop and maintain prompt-engineering fluency; stay current with the evolving AI tooling landscape and proactively identify productivity opportunities

Commercial & Executive Contribution

• Own the commercialisation of products — not just their strategy and delivery: partner with the CEO, CFO and commercial leadership on go-to-market strategy, product positioning, pricing and commercial models
• Drive the product marketing narrative jointly with the Marketing team
• Participate actively in pre-sales technical conversations, providing product depth and credibility in enterprise customer engagements
• Lead win/loss analysis alongside the sales team, feeding commercial intelligence directly into roadmap decisions
• Track, report on and drive improvement in product-led growth metrics: adoption, expansion and retention
• Own the structure and execution of new feature pilots, ensuring they are designed to generate clear, actionable go/no-go evidence
• Contribute to investor and board-level product reporting, communicating the product narrative with confidence and clarity
• Own product positioning in the South African financial services and regtech sector, understanding the compliance requirements and buyer dynamics that determine commercial success

Stakeholder Management & Communication

• Serve as the primary product interface for internal and external stakeholders, operating with confidence, independence and executive presence
• Act as the connective tissue across sales, marketing, operations, finance, customer success and security — keeping the organisation aligned around product direction
• Provide regular, proactive, data-driven reporting to the CEO and leadership team, communicating progress, risks and insights without being prompted
• Represent iiDENTIFii’s platform capabilities confidently in customer, partner and investor conversations
• Build and maintain iiDENTIFii’s presence in the digital identity and fintech ecosystem — engaging with industry peers, standards bodies and strategic networks to stay ahead of market shifts, surface partnerships, and position iiDENTIFii as a thought leader in biometric authentication

Living the iiDENTIFii Culture

• Champion iiDENTIFii’s culture, values and purpose across the product team and the broader organisation
• Foster a team environment defined by intellectual rigour, psychological safety, collaborative excellence and a bias for action
• Actively contribute to iiDENTIFii’s mission: powering innovators in remote biometric digital authentication, globally

QUALIFICATIONS, EXPERIENCE & TECHNICAL SKILLS NEEDED

• 15+ years in product management, with at least 8–10 years in a senior product leadership role (Head of Product, CPO, or equivalent)
• Proven track record of building, scaling and leading product teams in technically sophisticated, fast-paced environments
• Demonstrated success owning a product portfolio end-to-end, from strategy and discovery through delivery and commercial outcomes
• Experience in or strong affinity for platform/API-first products, developer tooling, data products, or identity/verification technology
• Background in B2B / enterprise product contexts with complex stakeholder environments and integration-heavy customer relationships
• Startup or scaleup experience strongly preferred; comfort operating at pace with ambiguity and limited structure
• Experience contributing to fundraising, investor narratives, or board-level product communication is advantageous

Technical, AI and Domain Experience

• Credible technical fluency across APIs, microservices, mobile/web development lifecycles, integrations, cloud and data platform concepts — enough to engage credibly with engineering and make sound product decisions (deep hands-on engineering is not required)
• Understanding of security principles, enterprise-grade systems and developer experience, including the value of strong developer-facing documentation
• Demonstrated, hands-on use of AI tools for research, analysis, decision-making, productivity and prompt engineering, with a mindset of continuous AI adoption
• Strong understanding of digital identity, KYC, biometrics, fintech/regtech environments, enterprise B2B product dynamics, and relevant regulatory frameworks (POPIA, FICA, GDPR)

Education

• A degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Business, or a related field; an MBA or equivalent advanced degree is advantageous but not required where experience speaks for itself
• Demonstrated track record of bringing a significant new product or product category to market, from concept through commercial traction, in an enterprise or platform context

CULTURE AND BENEFITS

Why Join Us

iiDENTIFii is solving one of the most consequential technical problems in Africa's digital economy: how do you verify that someone is who they say they are, remotely, at scale, across infrastructure that is inconsistent and high stakes? Our biometric identity platform is trusted by some of the continent's most demanding institutions precisely because we have built something that works.

Benefits

• Your money works harder here. As an iidentifii employee, you gain exclusive access to ABSA's Employee Value Proposition, including preferential rates on home loans, vehicle finance, and personal loans, putting real financial benefit in your pocket from day one
• Performance pays. Our competitive compensation package is designed to reward people who make an impact, because we believe exceptional work deserves exceptional recognition
• Family comes first. We offer enhanced family responsibility leave, giving you the time and space that matters most when life calls
• Your annual leave entitlement grows with your tenure
• Cape Town preferable; remote-first culture
• A technically excellent, mission-driven team at the frontier of biometric identity technology

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