Who We Are!
🌍 Africa has the world’s youngest and fastest-growing population. By 2035, the continent is poised to contribute more young people to the global workforce each year than the rest of the world combined.
At Educate! we're obsessed with impact. We leverage iterative learning to build highly scalable youth employment solutions aimed at unlocking the potential of the world’s youngest continent.
Educate! prepares youth in Africa to learn, earn and thrive in today’s economy by:
- Introducing an employment-focused school subject into secondary and
- Delivering livelihood boot camps for out-of-school youth, with a focus on marginalized rural girls and young women.
To date, more than 500,000 youth have been meaningfully impacted across Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, and Tanzania, and along the way, Educate! has become the largest youth employment and skills provider in East Africa.
Educate! is a team of over 300 largely African staff and 300 volunteer youth mentors. We prioritize building an engaging, fulfilling and growth oriented work environment. 50% of our top 30 leaders have been with us for over 5 years, 10+ alumni have started their own organizations, and 6 current or former team members were Acumen Fund East Africa fellows.
We have been backed by top foundations such as Imaginable Futures, Livelihood Impact Fund, Jack Dorsey’s #startsmall, CIFF and Echidna Giving. Educate! won a 2018 Klaus J. Jacobs Prize and a 2015 WISE Award, and has been highlighted by the World Bank’s S4YE's Impact Portfolio, an Al Jazeera documentary, BBC, The Brookings Institution as one of 14 case studies on scaling education, and the Gates Foundation as a Goalkeepers Accelerator. In 2022, we received a catalytic investment from philanthropist Mackenzie Scott to scale our systems change work.
Educate!'s long-term vision is to design solutions that measurably impact millions of youth across Africa each year.
Good to note: To Our Awesome Applicants! 🚀💫
We know that incredible candidates sometimes hesitate to apply if they don’t meet every requirement. If this role excites you, we encourage you to apply!
We’re looking for passionate individuals who believe in our mission and can bring unique perspectives to our team—not just those who check every box. We value diversity and strongly encourage women and individuals from all backgrounds to apply.
Position Overview
At Educate!, the Senior Product Associate will play a crucial role in driving user research, product experimentation, and continuous improvement to meet the needs of Africa’s youth. This role combines hands-on experimentation, ensuring that all product development efforts align with Educate!’s long-term mission of transforming education for millions of youth across Africa. The successful candidate will collaborate with cross-functional teams to lead user-centered validations, develop frameworks for experimentation, and optimize product development processes.
The Educate! Experience is currently impacting 32,000 youth in Ugandan secondary schools and is Educate!s most mature product. Within the context of this product we continuously seek to maintain and deepen our impact whilst also conducting research and development initiatives that benefit other Educate! Products. The Senior Product Associate will play a pivotal role in ensuring data-driven insights are available to guide the product team in strategic decisions and inform product improvements. The Senior Product Associate will be trusted to define the plan and execute against a discrete feature component or workstream with minimal managerial direction. In addition, they support knowledge management and knowledge exchange across products to ensure insights from EXP inform other products. By supporting product leaders in building high-impact, user-driven products, this role is central to Educate!’s mission of creating educational solutions that drive meaningful change.
The ideal candidate will recognize this as their core skills set:
- Customer-Centric Approach: Bring a deep understanding of user needs, leveraging feedback and insights to continuously refine product offerings. They should be excited about interacting with youth and driven by a sense of curiosity to deeply understand their needs and opportunities to set them up for success.
- Collaborative and Team-Oriented: This role requires seamless collaboration with product leaders, designers, programs implementation teams and other key stakeholders. The candidate must excel in fostering a positive, cross-functional work environment, driving alignment across teams, and proactively manage a small set of working relationships independently, particularly with the LX Designer, the product strategist and the implementation lead.
- Clear Communication: Strong written and verbal communication skills are essential. The candidate must effectively translate complex product ideas and insights into actionable plans for both technical and non-technical teams.
- Project Management, Problem-Solving, and Innovation: The ideal candidate should demonstrate strong project management capabilities to drive the successful end-to-end implementation of experiments. They must be skilled at identifying obstacles and devising solutions that ensure efficient product iterations and timely delivery.
- Analytical and Data-Driven: The candidate should possess a strong data analysis skill set and analytical mindset, comfortable with cleaning, analyzing, and interpreting complex data to derive actionable insights. Familiarity with data analytics tools and experimentation methodologies is crucial for informed decision-making.
What You’ll Do🌟
Lead end-to-end project management and execution of experiments and continuous discovery against EXP product roadmap
- Design and Manage Experiment Implementation: Lead the end-to-end project management and execution of experiments within the product team to validate hypotheses and improve the user experience, ensuring alignment with product goals.
- Utilize the Sandbox Process: Drive the use of the sandbox environment within the team to prototype, test, and validate product features in a controlled, low-risk setting.
- Define Metrics and KPIs: Collaborate with the product team to establish clear metrics and KPIs for each experiment, ensuring they align with both immediate and long-term product objectives.
- Document and Share Insights: Maintain comprehensive documentation of experiment outcomes and share key learnings within the team to continuously optimize future experimentation efforts in and beyond EXP.
Increase the EXP impact unit capability to rapidly test and iterate while running a product at scale
- Co-Create Experimentation Frameworks: Collaborate with the product team and product ops function to adapt and apply standardized experimentation frameworks (e.g., A/B testing, multivariate testing, and rapid prototyping) to fit the specific needs of the product.
- Provide Tools and Resources: Leverage the tools, resources, and processes rolled out by the product operations function to streamline experimentation within the product team.
- Enhance Methodologies: Work with the product team to continuously assess and refine experimentation methodologies, ensuring they are aligned with best practices and the product’s unique requirements.
- Support Team Training: Co-create training and resources with the product operations function to empower the product team in utilizing experimentation frameworks effectively for product development.
Facilitate feedback loops from youth and frontline teams to enhance product design and delivery
- Lead User Research: Conduct usability testing, user interviews, and other research efforts to validate product assumptions and gain insights into user needs.
- Synthesize Feedback: Analyze user feedback and data to provide actionable insights that inform product improvements.
- Integrate Insights Continuously: Ensure that user insights are regularly incorporated into the product development process to drive ongoing refinement.
- Advocate for Users: Champion user-centered design solutions in product discussions and iterations to ensure the product aligns with user needs.
- Collaborate on Feedback Integration: Work with the product team to establish efficient processes for transforming frontline feedback into actionable backlog items, ensuring this feedback is prioritized and integrated into future product iterations.
- Collaborate closely with LX designers to co-design prototypes, ensuring user insights are rapidly translated into testable concepts.
Driving Data-Driven Insights to inform product strategy
- Conduct Data Analysis, Monitor KPIs, and Formulate Strategic Recommendations: Lead the cleaning, analysis, and interpretation of quantitative and qualitative data and support the tracking of key performance indicators (KPIs) to assess product efficiency, quality, and impact. This includes formulating clear, evidence-based recommendations for feature direction and advocating for a defined position during strategic decision-making.
- Support Feature Prioritization: Assist the product strategist in prioritizing and implementing frontline-driven features, collaborating with the team to streamline the feedback loop and reduce the cycle time from insight capture to feature release.
- Facilitate Continuous Improvement: Participate in regular retrospectives and reviews to optimize the integration of feedback into product development, helping to refine experimentation practices and ensure that product improvements are consistently aligned with user needs.
Who You Are 🦸♀️🦸♂️
- 3-5 years in product management, operations, or related fields with a focus on experimentation and user-centered design.
- Skills: Proven project management abilities, strong data analysis skills, analytical mindset, strong communication abilities, and a solid understanding of experimentation tools and methodologies.
- Attributes: Collaborative, data-driven, and proactive, with a passion for driving user-focused product improvements.
- Informal Leadership: Demonstrate informal leadership by serving as a visible technical resource for others on the team, and may be asked to mentor or onboard junior associates.
- Dynamic experience is highly preferred, and can operate well in complex and fast-changing environments.
- The ideal candidate has worked in a very early-stage startup trying to achieve product-market fit or led a new product or program within a larger organization.
- Experience working with diverse stakeholders and managing many priorities
- Passion for Educate!’s mission is a must, but past work in education or youth development is not required. We value diverse perspectives and encourage applications from people with various backgrounds. Background working with youth in the informal sector would be an asset.
- Fits our Five Culture Tenets (see What is Educate! About? below); Learn more by looking at Educate!’s culture deck here
What We Offer
- A vibrant, mission-driven environment with a supportive and fun team.
- Competitive salary based on experience.
- Learning & growth opportunities
Application Process: Rolling basis, interviews happening soon!
Terms
- Location is Kampala, Uganda
Our Culture & Tenets(Values) 🌱
We’re ambitious. Are you? Educate! is growing fast, so new opportunities are opening up and expanding all the time. We’re inspired by people with drive, and we love to help them reach their full potential. We expect everyone at Educate! to contribute above and beyond their job description, grow their skills, and advance their careers, and we are committed to supporting our staff members on that journey of their careers, and we are committed to supporting our staff members on that journey.
- We put Youth First, Impact-Obsessed - We are purpose-driven, focused on impact, and prioritize what truly matters. We listen to youth, design our efforts around their needs, and ensure every dollar creates transformative experiences they value.
- We Exceed Expectations - We take pride in going above and beyond to achieve the best results—proactively identifying problems and seeking solutions without waiting or stopping at what's requested.
- We Are Always Learning - We are committed to seeking and applying new knowledge and ideas. We stay open-minded and continuously try new things, experiment, grow, and improve. We invest in learning for ourselves and our teams.
- We are One Team, Many Views - We value all individuals, believe diverse ideas and open dialogue drive excellence, foster a supportive and respectful environment where everyone can freely express themselves. We work as one team and prioritize the organization's mission over personal or team interests.
- We have the Startup Mindset - We innovate relentlessly to grow our impact, we never think “we have arrived” or “we’re done.”We constantly challenge the status quo, embrace change, and move quickly toward our vision. Unafraid of failure, we question anything that hinders progress.
Every person at Educate! — from interns to the executive director — is evaluated by how they live up to these five cultural tenets. They are at the core of how we achieve our mission and why we work as well as we do. Educate is committed to providing an inclusive and welcoming environment for all who interact in our community. In creating this environment, we encourage people from a variety of cultures, backgrounds and life experiences to join our diverse team.
We’re committed to ensuring all candidates are screened for child and youth safety. As part of the process, you’ll need to provide a Certificate of Good Conduct. Educate! reserves the right to withdraw employment offers if any risks to youth are identified.
