Director: Product Led Growth

Director: Product Led Growth

Department: Product Management

Employment Type: Full Time

Location: South Africa

Description

The Role
We are building a product-led growth motion from the ground up, and we are hiring the person who will own it.

We run a substantial self-serve business: a long tail of prepaid SMS customers across more than 200 countries. It is the business the company was founded on and an established, material part of what we do today. It is well run and it performs. Reinvigorating it around a product-led growth motion is where a lot of the upside in this role sits - a proven global customer base with clear scope to grow and to improve its margin mix.

Alongside it we are bringing a new AI-powered Chat Commerce SaaS product to market, sold self-serve and designed to grow into enterprise relationships. Ambitious first-year target, and the platform work is well advanced - so this is a launch-and-grow challenge, not a wait-for-engineering one

You own the growth engine across both - and the bridge between them, turning a global long-tail base into one of the most efficient acquisition channels we have for the new product

Why this role, why now? The early work here is as much market discovery as funnel mechanics. For the new product there is no behavioural data yet to optimise against, so the first job is to go and find out who this is for, what they will pay, and what to say to them. If you want a role where you get to set the strategy rather than inherit it, that is the part to pay attention to.

Responsibilities

1. Build the PLG motion from zero

• Turn the ICP, positioning and packaging into a live funnel, and re-validate them against real signup behaviour once traffic exists.
• Design the end-to-end self-serve journey: acquisition, free trial, onboarding, activation, first value, paid conversion and expansion.
• Build in-product growth loops - onboarding checklists, contextual prompts, usage-based upgrade triggers, referral and sharing mechanics, templates and sample flows.
• Run a real experimentation cadence: prioritised backlog, clear hypotheses, honest read-outs - and sound judgement about what thin early data can and cannot tell us.

2. Reinvigorate the self-serve business

• Own the self-serve funnel end to end, and its growth metrics.
• Segment the existing base by market, use case and behaviour, and quantify where value and risk actually sit.
• Lift retention and recurring revenue: repeat purchase rates, involuntary churn, payment success across markets, and structured reactivation campaigns.
• Identify the self-serve customers whose use cases fit the new product, and design migration paths into it - without damaging the revenue you already have.

3. Instrument the funnel and make the numbers trustworthy

• Define the metric tree for both products and establish the single source of truth for each number in it.
• Specify the event taxonomy and tracking plan, and work with engineering and data to implement it. We do not currently have a mature product analytics or experimentation stack, so expect to select, justify and stand one up.
• Build the dashboards and cohort views that the executive team, product and marketing all work from.

4. Lead the technical work without managing the engineers

• Set and defend the PLG priorities for the product, engineering, data and web resources allocated to this work.
• Write clear specifications and acceptance criteria, and participate credibly in design and technical reviews.
• Work directly with engineers on instrumentation, feature flagging, API and SDK onboarding experience, developer documentation and self-serve provisioning.

5. Build the bridge to enterprise sales

• Define what a product-qualified lead is for this business, and build the scoring and routing to act on it.
• Design the handoff from self-serve usage into enterprise sales conversations, and agree the rules of engagement with the commercial teams.
• Instrument and report the full path from signup to enterprise deal, and improve it.

6. Lead across the organization

• Enterprise pricing, the corporate brand and the wider marketing estate are shared with other teams. Moving them is a matter of evidence and persuasion rather than instruction, and you will be backed at exec level in making that case. If you enjoy building coalitions and winning arguments on the strength of the data, this is the interesting part of the job.

Metrics you will be accountable for
You will be measured on the growth and quality of the funnel, and on the revenue that comes out of it.

Skills, Knowledge and Expertise

Essential

• You have built a product-led growth motion from zero in a B2B SaaS business - not inheriting and optimizing an existing one.
• You have owned a revenue number and moved it, with specifics you can walk us through: what you changed, what it produced, and how you knew.
• Hands-on with instrumentation and analysis: you specify events, build and interrogate funnels and cohorts, and make confident decisions on small samples while being honest about how confident you actually are.
• Enough technical depth to lead technical people credibly: you read API documentation without flinching, understand webhooks, data models, authentication and integration flows, and can hold your own in a design review.
• The temperament for a role with wide scope and narrow formal authority. You build coalitions, you are comfortable with ambiguity, and you are happy to do the unglamorous work yourself in the early stages.
• You do your own primary research. You have run customer interviews, win/loss and competitive analysis yourself, and you have changed a product or a go-to-market decision because of what you heard.
• Positioning and messaging craft. You can show us a page, a pricing table or a launch narrative you wrote that moved conversion, and explain why the words worked across lifecycle and CRM, content and organic acquisition, paid channels, and conversion-rate on high-intent surfaces
• Product judgement as well as growth judgement: you can assess an opportunity, shape a roadmap, and decide what to build versus what to optimise - not just specify what has already been decided.
• Commercial literacy: You have set or materially changed pricing and packaging for a product, using evidence about what the market will pay rather than what the spreadsheet needs

Desirable

• Background in CPaaS, messaging, communications, payments, fintech, SaaS.
• Experience growing self-serve revenue in international markets, with the multi-currency, local payment method and regulatory complexity that entails.
• Experience marketing to technical buyers and developers as well as to SMB operators.
• Experience running a PLG motion that feeds an enterprise sales organisation, including PQL design.
• Exposure to migrating an existing customer base onto a new product without damaging the revenue you already have.
• Experience building marketplace, platform or integration partnerships as a self-serve acquisition channel.
• Experience taking a product to market in a category where the buyer does not yet know they have the problem

Benefits

Working with a world-class, award-winning, international team with strong values and a meaningful ambition. You can expect work that will stretch you, grow you, and allow you to shape products and experiences that matter. We are building with intent, learning continuously, and creating real impact.

Other benefits include:

o Medical Aid contribution o Pension fund contribution o Quarterly performance incentive bonus o Risk benefit company contributionso Reimbursable communications allowance for internet and mobile phone billso Half-day off on your birthdayo 5 personal days leave a year, over and above your annual leave + ½ day off on your birthday o Flexible working conditions (remote & in person) with access to office hubs as required *current policy o Home office set-up with laptop, monitor and other related items.