Energicity is a leading developer of solar and hybrid microgrid utilities in Africa, delivering affordable, reliable, scalable electricity to rural off grid families and businesses.

Energicity is looking for a key contributor in developing and implementing our product strategy to enable a full-service energy solution for our growing footprint, serving a customer base of rural smallholder farmers and businesses. This customer segment has been meaningfully neglected and has opportunities ripe for cutting edge innovation as we work to build inclusive wealth creating economies, powered by solar electricity.

Based on our core capabilities, Energicity is currently deploying minigrid utilities in concessions in Sierra Leone and Benin to serve 100,000 people. Further, the company is developing a new pipeline to develop minigrids to serve another 100,000 people in West Africa in 2022 and 2023. Beyond just providing light, Energicity’s electrification services enable rural off grid communities:

• better health care outcomes with modern health care equipment, vaccines and light for nighttime procedures
• significantly increases wealth and opportunity for rural entrepreneurs and smallholder farmers.
• dramatic improvements in test scores for children in school, and

Candidates will lead innovation on our internal operating platform managing our customer information/ relationship and minigrid monitoring, our Internet of things (IOT) enabling connectivity and control and our customer facing engagement tools to enable best in class service delivery for energy access.   We are looking for a Director of Product Development who can lead both the software and hardware roadmap of our business to scale up to meet the needs of hundreds of thousands of customers and provide a transformative customer experience.

If you are up for the challenge of scaling our Product impact while providing electricity to thousands of customers, then please send your CV and cover letter to [email protected] by September 28th 2022.

The role’s responsibilities include:

• Integrate Energicity’s software and IOT strategies and products to build best in class energy management and customer facing tools for the unique challenges and opportunities of serving underserved offgrid markets  with distributed, renewable energy
• Define and lead execution of Energicity’s product roadmap including developing business cases and prioritizing road map based on business impact and technical requirements
  • Lean forward into the customer experience, corporate operational requirements and technology trends to inform innovation and high impact evolution of our core capabilities
  • Leverage experimental design approaches developing hypotheses and testing new ideas.  Be an advocate for innovation and experimentation throughout the organization.
  • Translate product strategy into detailed requirements and prototypes
  • Seek cross-functional feedback from Customer and Technical Operations teams to measure and collect feedback on results, informing future product roadmap
  • Evaluate, select, and execute integration with third-party service providers, such as APIs, servers, etc. with long-term scalability as a key consideration

• Partner with the management team defining business cases to align prioritization of product strategy.
  • Use data to build product development narratives and prioritization, and to communicate which product dependent business cases can produce the greatest benefit to the organization.
• Manage  team of software developers and quality assurance team members, lead implementation of product roadmap leveraging latest practice such as the DevOps approach through entire product lifecycle
  • Lead internal and external teams in designing building, testing, deploying, and measuring  changes to existing software
  • Enhance Energicity’s IT infrastructure security and scalability
  • Own the responsibility for defining the scope of development for new product features and incorporate sound management of backlog and project management activities in an agile format.
  • Define the technical requirements with a deep understanding of the platform’s user needs in mind (e.g., internal stakeholders, customers), as well as implications / dependencies on the platform’s entire architecture and codebase
  • Monitor the progress of the product, assess risk and control the product delivery and communicate the contingency plans for the team and the product.Run various research to understand the most feasible feature or product to deploy with the minimum risk
• Manage internal meter design and development capability for ontime manufacturing of IOT devices in a rapidly scaling organization, including supply chain management
  • Develop and implement new capabilities and features to Energicity’s IOT stack – hardware and software – to enhance our operational monitoring and control of generation and grid infrastructure.
  • Lead hardware and assembly in West Africa of the IOT hardware product lines including supply chain, inventory management, manufacturing, quality control
  • Conduct  failures analysis and lead from a value of continuous improvement identifying ways to improve the hardware and software to improve effectiveness, time and/ or cost.

Requirements and skills

• 5 years or more experience in product management in software or IOT required , MS/BS degree in Computer Science, Engineering or equivalent preferred
• Proven track record of managing all aspects of a successful product throughout its lifecycle, using agile methodologies
• Excellent communication skills, with ability to summarize key business implications to management while being comfortable with technical discussions with the development team
• User-centric attitude, leveraging curiosity, empathy and data  to solve customer and business  problems
• Professional experience with energy management, utilities, or metering technologies preferred
• Experience with C, Python, Javascript, or Node.JS  is preferred
• Fluency in English is required. Proficiency in French is a plus.

Energicity core values:

Honor – just as we honor each other, we honor the communities in which we work.  We respect our clients, we respect our stake holders.   We recognize that we are working across multiple cultures and that we try to understand each other’s perspective – knowing that it is our differences that make us the best. We may not always agree with each other, our customers, our stake holders, but at the core of every interaction must be respect.   

Teamwork – we value our team and we value each other.  We have each other’s back.  We communicate when something is working well and on track, we over communicate when something is not working well or on track.  We trust each other and trust that we are all working for the good of the company – and if something isn’t working the way we think it should, the course of action is to communicate, to be solution oriented, and to have each other’s back.

Learning – we strive to always be learning as an organization and as individuals.  We are solution oriented in all things.   If there’s a problem, we’re always looking at ways to fix it.  If there’s not a problem, we’re always  looking for ways to innovate to be the best we can be.  We set up experiments and tests to try to do things better, we learn when things work, we learn when things don’t.  We aren’t afraid to fail, we ARE afraid not to learn.

Excellence – Everything we do must be of the highest quality from building and maintaining solar systems, to our software systems, to our documentation.  We double and triple check our own work and each other’s work.  We take responsibility for making things great; we also take responsibility and fix things immediately with anyone who is impacted if anything is less than great.