About the role
About Umba Umba is a pan-African digital bank operating in Kenya and Nigeria, on a mission to make financial services more accessible, affordable, and empowering for millions of people across Africa. Since acquiring a licensed microfinance bank in Kenya in 2023, we have grown revenue more than sixfold and built a stack of products spanning Lending, Savings, Fixed Deposits, FX, and (in development) Trade Finance, for both individuals and SMEs. 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.