Principal Product Strategist

Position Overview

Educate!, an innovative and award-winning social enterprise, is seeking a Principal Product Strategist to lead the Out-of-School Youth (OoSY) Uganda Product. This role is central to our mission of creating alternative education pathways for out-of-school youth, with a focus on empowering young women in rural areas. Leveraging a product-led approach, the Senior Strategist will ensure that our solutions equip youth with the skills necessary for quality self-employment in the informal economy. This role demands a strong emphasis on impact, scalability, and collaboration with key stakeholders, particularly large-scale payer entities.

The Senior Strategist is responsible for shaping and executing the strategy for the OoSY Product, driving product innovation, and ensuring alignment across multiple product lines. Key responsibilities include developing the Theory of Change, overseeing product life cycles, and fostering a culture of user-centricity. This role also involves monitoring and managing product performance, advocating for product needs, and ensuring that our offerings meet market demands.

About Educate! 

Educate! is on a mission to create alternative education pathways for out-of-school youth in East Africa, focusing on equipping them with the skills needed for quality self-employment in the informal economy. We envision a future where our products are delivered at scale to hundreds of thousands of youth annually, sold to large single-payer entities, and ultimately implemented by governments. Our OOSY (Out of School Youth) solution line operates akin to an enterprise software product, providing standardized, high-impact solutions with minimal customization.

Our strategic approach prioritizes the informal economy, as 85%-90% of youth work in this sector. We aim to impact hundreds of thousands of youth, emphasizing broadly transferable skills for informal economy entrepreneurship while allowing light customization for specific labor market needs. We aim to impact hundreds of thousands of youth, emphasizing broadly transferable skills for informal economy entrepreneurship while allowing light customization for particular labor market needs. In the next 5 years, our top priority across the organization is developing and scaling for out-of-school youth. 

Educate! is a team of over 160 largely African staff and 300 volunteer youth mentors. We prioritize building an engaging, fulfilling, and growth-oriented work environment. 50% of our top 30 leaders have been with us for over 5 years, 10+ alumni have started other organizations and 5 current or former team members were Acumen Fund East Africa fellows.

We have been backed by top foundations and product leaders such as Imaginable Futures, Big Bang Philanthropy, Echoing Green, the 1st Google Employee’s foundation, the head of Google Search, and Rippleworks Foundation. Educate! won a 2018 Klaus J. Jacobs Prize and a 2015 WISE Award, and has been highlighted by Bill Gates, in the World Bank’s S4YE's Impact Portfolio, an Al Jazeera documentary, BBC, and The Brookings Institution as one of 14 case studies in their global scaling education learning initiative. Educate! was also selected by the UN’s Generation Unlimited as 1 of 20 innovative youth solutions and by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as a Goalkeepers Accelerator.

Educate!'s long-term vision is to design solutions that measurably impact millions of youth across Africa each year.

Key Responsibilities:

• Develop a data-driven, user-centered product strategy that enables repeatable impact at scale.
• Ensure strategic alignment between product design, program implementation, and field operations for optimal product delivery.
• Accelerate product development through a solid data strategy (discovery and experiments).
• Lead the product design team to ensure the product is built for impact.

Strategic Development & Visioning:

• Drive the development and execution of the OoSY Solution Line strategy, ensuring alignment with Educate!’s mission and long-term goals.
• Lead the planning and execution of new site developments in Uganda and other target geographies, ensuring alignment with payer preferences and organizational expansion goals.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to design products that are 80% standardized with the flexibility for 20% customization to meet specific payer requirements.
• Position the OoSY Solution Line for ‘Big Bet’ deals, ensuring product offerings align with payer needs and specifications.
• Continuously refine the OoSY strategy based on defined metrics such as total youth impact, ROI, and income generation.
• Lead the adaptation of successful interventions across different contexts to maximize product benefits.

• Oversee the product development lifecycle, setting the vision and strategy for the OoSY Solution Line and ensuring alignment with Educate!’s overall goals.
• Manage and mentor the OoSY Solution Line team, fostering a culture of innovation, data-driven decision-making, and continuous learning.
• Champion a culture of experimentation, encouraging the team to test new ideas, learn from outcomes, and iterate based on results.
• Lead the planning and execution of product stage retreats, ensuring effective collaboration and decision-making across impact units.

• Own the product roadmap, prioritizing initiatives that align with strategic goals and drive impact.
• Collaborate with the DPI and country leadership teams to drive the product development strategy forward.
• Lead research and evaluation efforts, ensuring that insights inform program model development and iterations.
• Oversee the integration of behavior change insights into the product strategy to enhance impact and effectiveness.
• Ensure the product’s cost model aligns with Educate!’s investment framework and strategic priorities.

• Lead and oversee impact units in designated geographies, ensuring that the global product strategy aligns with local contexts.
• Facilitate retreats and manage collaboration across impact units, ensuring coherence and alignment despite diverse geographical contexts.
• Collaborate with executives to identify and address strategic needs across various products, adjusting roles as necessary.

Experience & Qualifications:

• 8+ years of experience in product management
• Proven experience in dynamic environments, particularly in early-stage startups or new product lines within larger organizations.
• Familiarity with lean startup methodologies and a strong record of running successful product experiments.
• Demonstrated ability to lead and influence small teams toward a common goal
• Demonstrated ability to collate with multiple stakeholders and large cross-functional teams
• Experience evaluating product decisions and prioritization trade-offs
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Demonstrated application of user science and empathy to better understand users and fit products to user needs and behaviors e.g. success in using surveys, interviews, prototyping, and product analytics 
• Proven experience in understanding and representing different user types and their needs through synthesizing user science into insights to shape product direction
• Prior experience in growing people and organizations through managing, mentorship, and coaching 
• Passion for Educate!’s mission is creating transformative experiences for youth, with a commitment to continuous learning and improvement.
• Fits our Five Cultural Tenets (see What is Educate! About? below); Learn more by looking at Educate!’s culture deck here

Location Details

• Kampala, Uganda

Terms

• Salary will be based on market factors and commensurate with experience.
• Benefits will align with the country of hire and typically include medical and travel insurance, flexibility on work hours and hybrid work, paid leave plus one week of office closure in December between the Christmas and New Year holidays, and more.

What Is Educate!  

We’re ambitious. Are you? Educate! is growing fast, so new opportunities are opening up and expanding all the time. We’re inspired by people with drive, and we love to help them reach their full potential. We expect everyone at Educate! to contribute above and beyond their job description, grow their skills, and advance their careers, and we are committed to supporting our staff members on that journey of their careers, and we are committed to supporting our staff members on that journey.

1. We put Youth First, Impact-Obsessed - We never forget that Educate! exists to impact youth. We are purpose-driven. We obsess over impact daily and if it doesn’t lead to impact, we want nothing to do with it. We prioritize interacting with and listening to youth. We design and manage the organization to ensure every dollar creates transformative experiences that youth value. 
2. We Exceed Expectations - We take pride in going above and beyond to achieve the best results. When we know what needs to be done, we do it. We don’t wait to be asked and we don’t stop at what is asked of us. We look for solutions as much as we identify problems.
3. We Are Always Learning - We are committed to seeking and applying new knowledge and ideas. We stay open-minded. We know there is always another way and we are excited to learn about it. We continuously look for resources of all kinds from multiple disciplines. We try new things, experiment, grow, and improve. We invest in learning for ourselves and our teams.
4. We are One Team, Many Views - We say what we think while treating each other well. We believe that all people have the same inherent value and that diverse ideas and open dialogue fuel excellence. We constantly strive to create an environment where everyone can and does express themselves freely. We support and respect each other as people and colleagues. We act as one team: We prioritize the organization's mission and goals over team or individual goals.
5. We have the Startup Mindset - We will always keep innovating to grow our impact. We aspire to be game-changing. We never think “we have arrived” or “we’re done.” We question the status quo in our industry. We move fast and embrace change to move towards our long-term vision. We’re not afraid of failure. We interrogate anything that slows us down. 

Every person at Educate! — from interns to the executive director — is evaluated by how they live up to these five cultural tenets. They are at the core of how we achieve our mission and why we work as well as we do. 

Educate is committed to providing an inclusive and welcoming environment for all who interact in our community.  In creating this environment, we encourage people from a variety of cultures, backgrounds, and life experiences to join our diverse team. 

Child Safeguarding: Educate! is committed to child-safe/youth-safe recruitment, selection and screening. Our recruitment and selection procedures reflect our commitment to the safety and protection of children in our programs. The successful candidate will be required to provide a satisfactory Certificate of Good Conduct as a condition of employment. We reserve the right to decline to offer employment to an individual or terminate an employment contract with an employee that may pose a risk to children and youth.