Product Manager: Operational Capabilities

Product Manager: Operational Capabilities

Lesaka Enterprise

Location

Cape Town, South Africa

Reporting To

Chief Operating Officer (COO) – Enterprise


Role Purpose

The Product Manager – Operational Capabilities is accountable for translating the COO's operational capability roadmap into shipped, adopted products that measurably improve how Lesaka Enterprise runs.

The role owns the end-to-end product lifecycle for operational capabilities — onboarding, activation, service management, reconciliation, observability, automation, and operational intelligence — from problem discovery through delivery, adoption, and measured impact.

Where the COO sets the direction for what operational capability the business needs, this role is accountable for building it: defining requirements, sequencing delivery with engineering and business-change partners, and ensuring capabilities are actually adopted and moving the operational metrics they were built to shift.

This is a hands-on, delivery-accountable role. Success is not a roadmap slide — it is a capability in production, in use, with a measurable before-and-after.

Role Context

Lesaka Enterprise's operating environment spans multiple business lines (ADP, Utilities, Transact, Crypto, and future Enterprise businesses), each with distinct operational demands but shared underlying capability needs.

The COO is accountable for a defined set of operational capability domains, and this role is the product owner for building them out. The domains include, but are not limited to:

• Service Operations — IT Operations, Customer Operations, and service/incident management
• Reconciliation & Settlements — multi-way reconciliation, settlement file processing, and financial operations controls
• Onboarding & Activation — customer, merchant, and partner onboarding, and go-live/cutover management
• Operational Analytics & Observability — KPI frameworks, dashboards, and performance visibility
• Operational Automation & AI — workflow automation, AI-enabled tooling, and operational data platforms
• Escalation Management — structured triage and resolution of operational escalations

The COO function is building an operational capability platform to serve these needs at scale, including workflow automation, AI-enabled operational tooling, operational data and observability platforms, and graph-based operational intelligence.

This role sits inside the COO's team as the product owner for that capability build-out, working closely with the Head of Operations, Head of Business Change, engineering and technology partners, and the business-line operational leads who will use and depend on these capabilities.

Primary Responsibilities

1. Product Ownership of Operational Capabilities

Own the product backlog and delivery plan across the COO's capability domains — Service Operations, Reconciliation & Settlements, Onboarding & Activation, Operational Analytics, and Automation & AI — translating the roadmap into concrete, sequenced product work.

• Domain-specific requirements: e.g. reconciliation matching logic and control gaps, service-desk escalation workflows, onboarding go-live checklists
• Backlog ownership, prioritisation, and sprint/delivery planning
• Product quality, usability, and fitness for operational purpose — judged against how each domain actually operates, not generic product standards
• Clear definition of done tied to operational outcomes, not just feature completion

1. Roadmap Translation & Prioritisation

Convert the COO's capability priorities into a sequenced, resourced delivery roadmap, making the trade-off calls needed to move the needle fastest.

• Impact-based prioritisation across competing capability requests
• Clear articulation of what is in scope, what is deferred, and why
• Regular roadmap review and re-sequencing as operational priorities shift

1. Delivery Partnership with Engineering & Technology

Act as the primary product counterpart to engineering, ensuring capabilities are built to solve the real operational problem, not just the stated request.

• Requirements definition, user stories, and acceptance criteria
• Close partnership with technical leads through design, build, and release
• Unblocking delivery risks and making scope calls under time pressure

1. Adoption & Change Management

Own adoption as a product outcome, not an afterthought — a capability that is built but not used has not moved the needle.

• Rollout planning in partnership with Business Change and operational leads
• Training, documentation, and enablement material for end users
• Feedback loops from users back into the product backlog

1. Data, Measurement & Impact

Define and track the operational metrics that prove — or disprove — that a capability is working.

• Baseline and post-launch measurement for every capability shipped
• Operational KPI definition in partnership with the COO and Operations leadership
• Root-cause use of data to decide what to build next

1. Stakeholder Management

Manage a wide set of internal stakeholders with competing priorities, keeping delivery credible and expectations realistic.

• Regular reporting to the COO on roadmap progress and impact
• Direct engagement with business-line operational leads on their needs
• Alignment with Technology, Product, and Business Change on shared dependencies

1. Continuous Discovery & Improvement

Keep the capability roadmap grounded in real operational pain, not assumption.

• Ongoing discovery with operational teams to surface friction and gaps
• Benchmarking of capability maturity against operational needs
• A bias toward iterating and improving shipped capabilities, not just shipping new ones

Internal

• Chief Operating Officer (direct report line)
• Head of Operations
• Head of Business Change
• Chief Technology Officer / Engineering Leadership
• Business-line operational leads
• Finance, Risk, and Compliance stakeholders where operational controls are affected

External

• Technology and tooling vendors
• Service providers supporting operational delivery

Delivery

• Roadmap items shipped on plan
• Time from problem identification to capability in production

Adoption

• Active usage of shipped capabilities across business lines
• Reduction in workarounds and manual operational effort

Impact

• Measurable improvement in the operational metric each capability targeted
• Reduction in operational incidents, escalations, or reconciliation gaps tied to capability gaps

Stakeholder Confidence

• COO and Operations leadership confidence in roadmap delivery
• Positive feedback from business-line users on capability usability

Core Experience

• 5+ years in product management, ideally covering internal operational, workflow, or platform products
• Experience in fintech, payments, financial services, or other operationally intensive industries
• Track record of shipping products that changed how a team actually works, not just what was on a roadmap
• Comfort working directly with engineering teams on requirements and delivery trade-offs

Domain Knowledge — Service Operations

Practical understanding of how service operations functions run day to day, and where product intervention actually reduces load.

• IT Operations, Customer Operations, or Service Management within a technology-enabled or payments business
• Incident and escalation management: triage, root-cause analysis, and follow-through on corrective action
• SLA / OLA frameworks and the operational metrics that sit behind service performance
• Experience translating service-desk or operations-floor pain points into product requirements

Domain Knowledge — Reconciliation & Settlements

Working knowledge of reconciliation and settlement operations, not just adjacent process design — this is a capability area with its own technical vocabulary and failure modes.

• Multi-way reconciliation across settlement files, ledgers, and processor/bank data (e.g. ACB tape reconciliation, ledger-to-bank matching)
• Understanding of settlement rails, biller codes, and payment scheme mechanics relevant to South African payments (ACB, card, EFT)
• Exposure to reconciliation variance investigation and the controls needed to prevent recurring unmatched items
• Experience with switching or settlement platforms (e.g. Postilion, or equivalent) is a strong advantage

Domain Knowledge — Onboarding & Activation

• Merchant, customer, or partner onboarding workflows in a regulated or payments environment
• Activation and UAT processes for new clients, integrations, or product go-lives
• Experience with go-live checklists, cutover planning, and hypercare periods following migration or system change

Domain Knowledge — Operational Analytics, Automation & AI

• Experience specifying or building operational dashboards, KPI frameworks, and observability tooling
• Practical exposure to workflow automation and AI-enabled operational tooling (e.g. RPA, agentic tooling, decision-support systems)
• Comfort working with operational data platforms and translating raw data into decisions

Competencies

• Product discovery and requirements definition
• Prioritisation under competing stakeholder demands
• Data-driven decision making
• Change management and adoption-focused thinking
• Clear, direct stakeholder communication
• Comfort with ambiguity and evolving scope
• Ability to go deep enough into a technical/operational domain (e.g. reconciliation logic, settlement flows) to challenge and validate what engineering and operations teams tell you

The Product Manager – Operational Capabilities is the delivery engine behind the COO's operational capability roadmap.

By owning the product lifecycle from discovery through adoption and measured impact, this role ensures that operational capability investment translates into capabilities that are actually used and actually move the needle for Lesaka Enterprise.