Product Manager

About the role

You will be embedded in a client squad as its product manager, or working alongside the client's own PM to raise the practice. The domains are dense: payment rails, clinical workflow, grid telemetry, core banking. Understanding them properly is most of the job.

You will be asked to say no to well-sponsored ideas and to justify it with evidence. We back that.

About OneCluster

OneCluster is a product and engineering company that embeds inside regulated institutions across Africa: banks, telcos, health systems, logistics operators and energy companies. We were founded in 2026 by practitioners who spent their careers inside those organisations.

We work embedded in our customers’ own teams rather than alongside them. That means their repository, their CI, their on-call rotation, and their constraints: regulatory scrutiny, legacy integration, and a business that cannot absorb a bad release. Every piece of work has a partner on it, in the standup rather than on the proposal.

The measure of our work is that the customer keeps running the practice after we leave. That shapes how we hire: we look for people who can raise the standard of the team around them, not only ship their own work.

The team you join

You will work with a small embedded crew and directly with the client's own product and business stakeholders, often several levels up.

What you will do

• Run discovery with users who are clinicians, traders, agents or engineers, not consumers.
• Frame outcomes and shape a backlog that survives contact with a steering committee.
• Sit between architecture and business sponsorship, translating in both directions.
• Define and track the delivery metrics that show whether the squad is actually improving.
• Coach the client's product people through the same practice.

Minimum qualifications

• Five or more years in product management, at least two in a complex or regulated domain.
• Demonstrated discovery practice: you can describe research that changed a decision.
• Comfort reading an architecture diagram and arguing about trade-offs.
• Experience working directly with senior stakeholders without losing the thread.
• Clear written English; much of the influence here happens in writing.

Preferred qualifications

• Prior consulting, agency or embedded delivery background.
• Domain depth in financial services, health or telecommunications.
• Experience introducing product practice where none existed.

Your first three months

1. Map the current state honestly, including the parts nobody wants written down.
2. Agree what success actually means with the people who will judge it.
3. Ship a first slice within six weeks that proves something, rather than a roadmap that promises everything.
4. By month three, own the prioritisation conversation rather than facilitating it.

Compensation and benefits

Rates are agreed per engagement and depend on scope and seniority. We discuss numbers openly on the first call, before you spend time on a practical.

• Rates are agreed per engagement and discussed openly on the first call, before you spend time on a practical.
• Remote across Africa, with on-site weeks where the engagement calls for them.
• Work embedded inside regulated institutions, on systems with real consequences, alongside senior engineers who review your work and expect you to review theirs.
• Small crews and direct access to partners, with no layers between you and the decisions.
• Long relationships. We would rather work with the same capable people across engagements than hire for a single project.
• Straight answers. We tell you what we can and cannot offer before you commit, and we do not promise what we cannot deliver.

How we interview

The whole process is normally two to three weeks, and we work around your current job.

1. Application review. A partner reads every application. You hear back either way, usually within two working days.
2. Intro call, 45 minutes. Your background, what you want next, and honest answers about the work, the rate and the constraints.
3. Practical session, 2 hours. A realistic problem close to what the role actually involves, scheduled around you and sized to respect your time. We tell you the shape it takes when we book it.
4. Practical review, 60 minutes. We walk through what you built, why, and what you would change with more time.
5. Partner conversation, 45 minutes. Scope, expectations, terms, and your questions.
6. Decision, normally within two working days of the last conversation.

How to apply

Send an application through the form. A partner reads every one, and you will hear back either way. If you are unsure whether you qualify, apply anyway and say what you are unsure about.

We will tell you what we can and cannot offer before you commit to anything.

Apply for this role →