Senior Product Manager: Market & Innovation

Location: Cape Town, hybrid · Type: Permanent, full-time · Reports to: Chief Product Officer

About Lesaka

Lesaka Technologies is a Southern African fintech building the connected ecosystem for financial inclusion, transactional banking, lending, insurance, payments and cash management for merchants, consumers and enterprise clients across the region. Were publicly listed (Nasdaq: LSAK / JSE: LSK) and growing fast. EasyPay powers airtime, data, electricity, vouchers and 600+ bill payments through the largest retail footprint in South Africa.

The role

This role decides whats worth building. You own the intelligence and opportunity pipeline across our entire product portfolio; vouchers, virtual products, bill payments and utilities, turning market signal, competitor moves and customer demand into a prioritised stream of validated ideas. Your role is to bring substantiated opportunity; you define the product; engineering builds it.

What youll own

• Maintain a live view of the competitive landscape- categories, fees, UX, partner coverage and flag gaps and threats before they hurt us.
• Run the innovation pipeline: new voucher categories, bundles and novel selling constructs, framed as testable hypotheses rather than pet projects.
• Gather signal from partners, sales, market trends and customers and filter it ruthlessly into a ranked, defensible opportunity list.
• Identify cross-vertical levers, such as using vouchers to drive adoption of other products, and size the upside.
• Write clear problem statements and opportunity cases; hand engineering the what and why, not a spec.
• Partner with Commercial on price and revenue cases, and measure adoption and validation post-launch.

What you bring

• 5+ years in product management, ideally in fintech, payments, retail or telco/VAS.
• A track record of taking new products from market insight to launch.
• Strong competitor analysis and market research instincts, you teardown rivals as a habit, not a once-a-year deck.
• The judgement to filter noise from real patterns and say no to fads.
• Fluency working with commercial, engineering and partner stakeholders.
• Comfort owning outcomes (adoption, validation) without owning the day-to-day build.

Nice to have

• Experience with voucher, gift-card or VAS ecosystems.
• Exposure to partner and merchant integration models.

Our culture what we expect from you

Lesaka is a fast-paced fintech. The people who thrive here have a few things in common:

• You dont wait to be asked. If something is broken or unclear, you call for the ball and fix it.
• Fast adaptation. Priorities shift, markets move, regulations change. You dont flinch, you re-plan and move.
• Execution mindset. Ideas are cheap. Shipping is the job. You walk slow, run fast: think it through, then move with urgency.
• Customer first. The merchant, consumer or enterprise client is why we exist. Your decisions trace back to them.

If youd rather optimise a process to perfection over six months than ship something useful in six weeks, this wont be the right fit.