Senior Product Manager

Cape Town or Johannesburg-Based | Scale-Up | Full-time, Permanent | Product Machine | Hiring Manager: Dawie van der Westhuizen

Most of the world's workers do not sit at a desk. Jem exists to unlock them. We are hiring a Senior Product Manager to run a product squad: own the roadmap, own the gross profit number, and build the product with AI rather than around it.

Deskless workers have been last in line for good software for as long as software has existed. No company laptop, no company email, often no HR system that knows their name. Jem reaches them where they already are, on WhatsApp: HR services, workforce operations and employee benefits, for the people who keep operations running.

Jem is AI-native, and we mean it literally: if you take the AI out and it stops working, it was AI-native. Product managers write and ship code with Claude. Agents run large parts of our support, reporting and internal operations. Every task starts with one question: can AI do this better.

That puts you in a rare seat. You will shape two things at once: how a software team actually works when AI does most of the building, and how millions of deskless employees experience work when AI is doing the admin that used to eat their day. Very few people get to write both of those playbooks. Nobody has finished writing either.

The product organisation runs as small squads. Each one owns a product line, a gross profit target and a dedicated team: Financial Wellness, HRIS, Mobile, and Workforce Management. We are hiring a Product Lead to run one of them. Which one we decide together, based on where you are strongest and where we need you most.

This is not a roadmap-keeping job. You own a commercial number, a small dedicated team, and the go-to-market story for what you build. You will prototype and ship with AI tooling, and be answerable for whether what shipped made money.

⭐️ Your Mission

Take a Jem product line and grow its gross profit: build the product, build the team around it, and build the go-to-market motion that sells it

⭐️ What you own

• The number. Gross profit for your squad, not a proxy for it. You know your cost to serve, your messaging cost, your AI usage cost, and your margin per user. Every build decision is argued in those terms. Features that cannot clear their own cost of serve do not ship.
• The build. You are hands-on. You prototype, you write specs engineers trust, and you ship to production with AI tooling. At Jem the distance between "we know what customers need" and "it is live" is measured in days, and the Product Lead is inside that loop rather than managing it from outside.
• Go-to-market. You are accountable for whether the thing sells, not only whether it works. Pricing and packaging, the demo, sales enablement, the competitive answer, the launch, and the adoption curve afterwards. You sit in front of prospects. You know why we lose deals in your category and what it would take to stop losing them.
  
• The customer. Site visits, ride-alongs, shift changes at 5am if that is when the work happens. Deskless operations are exception-heavy and the data is never clean. The exceptions are the product.
• The team. A small dedicated squad: engineers, an implementation and adoption specialist, and consulting support where the domain needs it. You set the standard for how it works.
• The roadmap. What gets built, in what order, and why the thing you deprioritised sits below it. You defend that order with commercial logic and you change it when the evidence changes, not when the loudest person in the room pushes.
  
  

⭐️ What success looks Like

• Your squad hits its gross profit commitment, and you saw the miss coming a quarter early with a plan attached.
• Every shipped feature has a known margin contribution, tracked after launch. Underperformers get cut rather than carried.
• Sales can sell your product without you in the room, because you built the story and the enablement.
• AI is load-bearing in what you ship, not decorative. Removing it breaks something customers care about.
• Time to implement a new client drops every quarter.
• Engineering is never blocked on a decision you have not made.
• More deskless workers are reached, and better served, at the end of each quarter than at the start.
  
  

⭐️ You will thrive here if

• Have owned a commercial number, not just a roadmap, and can show what you did when it went sideways.
• Build with AI daily and can show us the artefacts: agents you run, prototypes you shipped, work you no longer do by hand.
• Argue in unit economics without being asked to.
• Can sell. Not as a favour to the sales team, as part of your job.
• Design for imperfect data, because that is what operational software actually receives.
• Would rather run one product line end to end than manage a slice of a big one.
• Care that the end user is a shift worker on a low-end phone, and let that shape what you build.
• Are comfortable that the org chart will change again. Ours has a shelf life of months.
  
  

⭐️ Requirements

• Evidence of owning a product line end to end with commercial accountability. Title and tenure matter less than what you can walk us through.
• Demonstrated use of AI in your own build loop: discovery, prototyping, spec writing, shipping. You can show what it replaced and what would break if it disappeared.
• Strong written communication. Specs, decision docs and customer briefs that engineering and revenue both trust.
• Commercial fluency: gross profit, cost to serve, margin per user, pricing.
• Comfort with operations-heavy B2B software, exception handling and messy client data. HR tech, payroll, fintech, telco or field operations experience is a strong advantage.
• South Africa based, willing to travel to client sites
  
  

⭐️ What you can expect from us

• A squad of your own with a real number attached, and the team to hit it.
• Direct line into Engineering, Revenue, Operations and the exec team. Product decisions get made in the leadership room and you will be in it.
• Hybrid work environment with a 3-day office policy in our Cape Town or Johannesburg office.
• Competitive salary, calibrated to the accountability rather than the title.
• Work that reaches hundreds of thousands of people who have been ignored by every other software company.
• A real hand in defining how an AI-native product team operates, at a company that is further down that road than almost anyone you will talk to.
• We respond to all applications. You can expect feedback on your application, even if we decide not to move forward.

To learn more about what Jem looks for beyond the CV, please check out our People Notes on the Jem Ideal Employee Profile here