Product Manager - Internal Tools and AI

Our mission

We’re making Africa the first cashless continent.

In 2017, over half the population in Sub-Saharan Africa had no bank account. That’s for good reason—the fees are too high, the closest branch can be miles away, and nobody takes cards. Without access to financial institutions, people are forced to keep their savings under the mattress. Small business owners rely on lenders who charge extortionate rates. Parents spend hours waiting in line to pay school fees in cash.

We’re solving this by building financial services that just work: no account fees, instantly available, and accepted everywhere. In places where electricity, water and roads don’t always work, you can still send money with Wave. In 2017, we launched a mobile app in Senegal for cash deposit, withdrawal, and peer-to-peer and business payments. Now, we have millions of users across 9 countries and are growing fast.

Our goal is to make Africa the first cashless continent and that’s where you come in…

How you’ll help us achieve it

Every promise our products make to a user or merchant is kept by an internal team somewhere in the company. When those teams can organise their work, adapt quickly and stay focused, Wave moves fast; when they can’t, the company slows down and customers feel it. When we were smaller, organizing work didn’t take much more than a quick spreadsheet but that breaks at scale.

Wave is now the largest financial institution in Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, and the Gambia. We work with millions of users every month, employ thousands of people, and are growing rapidly. Similar processes now run in a dozen countries, but each team has built its own version, either because they don’t know a better one exists or because setting it up well is harder than it should be.

AI has made this both better and worse: anyone can now build a workflow in an hour, but many aren’t secure, won’t scale, cost too much, or automate a process that should have been simplified first. Your job is to think from first principles about how work at Wave should run, give people a consistent and safe way to improve their own workflows, and make the common ones easy to adopt.

We’re looking for a product manager who gets a kick out of figuring out how work should actually flow, and who doesn’t much care whether the answer is a tool we build, a workflow in something we already pay for, or no tool at all. Someone who enjoys getting into the weeds with operations teams and who turns what they learn there into playbooks and building blocks every team can use.

In this role, you’ll…

• - Own how Wave’s general work tools get used. You’re accountable for tools like Slack, Monday, and AI serving teams well. You work with the People team and other stakeholders to make sure they’re set up so that organizing work or finding an answer is easy from day one. You help us make the right calls on major vendor decisions using what you’ve seen first-hand from users.
  • Help operations teams use AI efficiently and safely. You find the use cases where it truly saves teams time and turn those into shared skills, bots, and templates others can pick up in minutes. You build with these tools every day and teach teams to build in a secure and affordable way.
  • Care about the person, but solve for the company. There are far more problems than you can take on, so you pick the ones that help the most teams. You turn each solution into a playbook, template, or building block, and work through champions in every team to carry it forward.
  • Make sure each problem gets solved the right way. You’re the expert on how people organize work in general, but behind every workflow sits domain context, constraints, and sometimes a product tool that already fits. You work with the leaders and PMs in that domain to decide whether a process should be simplified, automated, or shouldn’t exist at all.
  • Build the team this work needs, starting with you. In your first few months you’ll spend much of your time in-country with our operations teams as an IC, setting up workflows yourself with Slack and Monday.com, creating Claude skills and writing the first playbooks. As you learn more about what the company needs you can help us form a team around you.

Key Details

• This is a fully remote role. Candidates must be based in one of our talent hub countries (UK, Spain, USA, Canada, Kenya and Ghana) or in one of our operating markets in Africa including Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, or Burkina Faso

• Wave is a distributed team, and we fund up to three in-person get-togethers a year, in line with Wave’s travel policy.

• Remote team members are expected to travel to our operational markets (e.g. Senegal or Côte d’Ivoire) at least once per quarter. Exceptions apply, but we’ve found this key to understanding our users and product.

• Our salaries are competitive and are calculated using a transparent formula. For this role, depending on your level and location, we offer a salary between $142,200 - $203,300 USD, plus a generous equity package.

• Major benefits:

  • Subsidised health insurance for you and your dependents, and retirement contributions (both vary from country to country).
  • 6 months of fully paid parental leave and subsidised fertility assistance.
  • Flexible vacation, with most folks taking between 21-30 days per year.
  • $10,000 annual charitable donation matching.

Requirement

• 5+ years of experience in product management, or in a similar role where you owned products or processes end-to-end, ideally in high-ownership, fast-paced environments like scale-ups.

• Proven success in overseeing all elements of the product development lifecycle, such as user research, design, implementation and evaluation

• Demonstrated hands-on experience designing and improving operational workflows that save teams time, produce accurate results, and run reliably at a reasonable cost.

• AI-fluent: you’ve used tools like Claude or ChatGPT to build skills, automations, or workflows that did something meaningful in your actual job, not just experiments.

• Speak fluent English

• Bonus if you

• Bonus if you

  • Speak at least conversational French
  • Have worked with Slack and an enterprise workflow tool like Monday, Jira or Linear.
  • Have worked in or closely with large operations teams (support, field, finance)
  • Are a mobile money user in Sub-Saharan Africa

You might be a good fit if you

• Resonate deeply with how we do product and have experience working that way.
• Are a strong communicator that can inspire and lead by influence.
• Are great at coordinating across teams and excel at communicating across multiple cultures.
• Have a good nose for user-focused product design and obsess over user experience.
• Take ownership for outcomes and do whatever you can to make them close to inevitable.
• Have strong instincts for asking questions that could move the needle.
• Have the courage and persistence to replan when feedback or new information arrives.
• Always listen with empathy but ruthlessly prioritize based on impact.
• Are excited about travel and meet users where they are — your users will be in Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, and other countries in Africa, and some travel will be essential.

About Product at Wave

Product has always been very important to us at Wave, starting from day one with two very strong product-minded founders. Product Managers play a central role in our organization, impacting large chunks of the company around them, similar to the founders they were shaped after years ago.

Our approach to building products may not be what you’ve seen in other places. Our processes are lightweight, informed by principles instead of methodologies and our PMs don’t just manage backlogs full of polished tickets. Read our write-up on product at Wave!

If you’re excited to own a real problem end-to-end, set your own goals, and guide a team toward outcomes that matter for real people, you’ll feel right at home here.

If that’s you, we’d love to meet you.

 

Our team

• We have a rapidly growing in-country team in Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, Burkina Faso, The Gambia, Uganda, Niger, Sierra Leone, and Cameroon plus remote team members spread across the world.
• We’re deeply passionate about our mission of bringing radically affordable financial services to the people who need them most.
• We foster autonomy for our employees. You’ll own your projects at every stage, from understanding the problem to monitoring your solution in production.
• We raised the largest Series A in Africa in 2021. Our world-class investors, include Founders Fund, Sequoia Heritage, Stripe, Ribbit Capital, Y Combinator, and Partech Africa.
• We are on Y Combinator’s top companies by revenue.

How to apply

Fill out the form below, and upload a resume in English and a cover letter describing your interest in Wave and the role.

We review applications frequently and recommend that you apply to the role that most closely aligns with your skills, experience and career goals.

Wave is an equal-opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.