Senior Product Manager (AI-Native)

Job Summary:

• We are hiring a Senior Product Manager to own product strategy and execution across our entire product surface: Lending, Savings & Deposits, FX, and the upcoming Trade Finance line. You will report to the Product Lead and partner directly with the CEO. This is not a traditional product role. Umba operates in an "AI-native environment". The team uses Claude Code, Claude Design, Codex, and similar tools to spec, prototype, and ship. The Senior PM is expected to write product and technical specifications that AI agents can execute against, drive delivery end to end, ship small PRs directly when it is faster than handing off, coordinate the stakeholders that turn a product into a business, and own the outcomes those products generate. The bar is moving 10x faster without sacrificing quality

Responsibilities:

•  The role spans two domains:

Strategy & Discovery

• Own the roadmap across Lending (Logbook, Asset Finance, UmbaPay Loans), Savings & Fixed Deposits, FX (Exchange, Virtual Account Numbers, international payouts), and the upcoming Trade Finance line.
• Run customer discovery directly with target segments: freelancers, SME exporters and importers, individual borrowers and savers.
• Size opportunities, instrument funnels, and validate hypotheses against production data. You do not wait for an analyst.
• Make prioritization calls across very different product lines (a credit-policy tweak vs. a new FX corridor vs. a deposit campaign) and defend them with numbers.
• Track competitor moves across African fintech (Eversend, Wave, Flutterwave, Kuda) and translate them into product decisions.                                   

Execution & Delivery

• Write product and technical specifications that engineers and AI coding agents can implement directly.
• Tight, unambiguous, testable.
• Prototype in Claude Design to validate concepts before committing engineering time.
• Code and ship small PRs yourself with Claude Code when it is faster than handing off. PMs at Umba live in the codebase.
• Drive delivery end to end. Own scope, timeline, and quality.
• Run delivery in Linear, our next-gen product and project management surface.
• Run the cadence with Engineering: standups, sprint reviews, unblocking, bug triage, and trade-off calls when things slip.
• Coordinate across stakeholders (CEO, Engineering, Data, Credit, Operations, Risk, Compliance, Marketing).
• Align scope, ship dates, and trade-offs across teams that have different incentives.
• Own outcomes, not output. Tie every initiative to a revenue, growth, or risk metric. Track it post-launch and iterate until the metric moves.
• Review AI-generated implementations, prototypes, and analyses for correctness, edge cases, and business fit.
• Build feedback loops: customer signal, spec, AI-assisted build, metric, next spec. Compress the cycle.
• Own launch comms and internal enablement.

Qualifications & Experience

• 5+ years in product management.
• Direct experience shipping consumer or SME products in fintech, banking, or lending.
• Track record of owning outcomes. You measure yourself by the metric that moved (revenue, active users,
• default rate, deposit growth), not by what was planned or shipped.
• Strong stakeholder coordination. You drive alignment across the cross-functional set above without losing your own thread.
• Strong written communication. You can write a spec a senior engineer does not need to ask questions about.
• Comfortable reading production data yourself. SQL fluency, or willing to get there in week one.
• Demonstrated proficiency with AI tools in your daily workflow (Claude Code, Claude Design, Codex, and similar tools). You have shipped real work with them, not just experimented.
• Comfortable reading and writing code, enough to ship a small PR with Claude Code.
• High agency. You move from problem to validated solution to shipped product without waiting to be told.
• Able to read CBK / CBN guidance and translate it into product requirements

Highly Preferred

• Experience with credit products (origination, scoring, collections) and deposit products (rate strategy,treasury, funding).
• Exposure to FX, cross-border payments, stablecoins, or virtual account infrastructure.
• Experience working with engineering teams that use AI coding agents in production workflows.
• Prior work in emerging markets, particularly Africa, SEA, or LATAM fintech.

Bonus

• Founder or 0 to 1 product experience.
• Familiarity with trade finance instruments (invoice factoring, LPO financing, purchase order financing).

Application Requirements

• Salary expectations in Kenyan Shillings.
• A short note on something you built end to end using AI. What it was, how you used AI to build it, what shipped.
• Valid work authorization for Kenya.
• In-office position in Nairobi