Product Lead (Payments)

Takealot.com, South Africa’s leading online retailer, is looking for a highly talented Product Lead to join the Payments team. 

We are a young, dynamic, hyper-growth company looking for smart, creative, hard-working people with integrity to join us! 

Think you’ve been challenged before? Think again!

• Scale: Over 4 million happy shoppers shop online on takealot.com. Show them what you can do.
• Learn: We work with the best of the best, and then some. Code alongside industry leaders and up-skill in record time. 
• Grow: Expand your career in the fast-growing Takealot Group: takealot.com and Mr D Food. We like to promote from within: Here’s your chance. 

Who’s who in the tech space

This position reports to the Head of Product.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it:

• Building the overall vision and roadmap of the Payments portfolio on all Takealot shopping platforms (web and apps).
• Participate in shaping takealot.com’s payment strategy and impacting how over 4 million South Africans pay for the things they love.
• Work cross-functionally with engineering, design, operations, and executive teams to bring about product enhancements that will improve payment-related processes.
• Define a compelling long-term product vision (3–5 years) and strategy for your product area, aligned with business goals and grounded in customer needs. Focus on elevating the end-to-end digital experience through innovation, differentiation, and the smart application of emerging technologies.
• Own and maintain an actionable product roadmap that clearly prioritizes features, enhancements, and strategic initiatives. Ensure the roadmap reflects evolving business priorities, customer feedback, and technological opportunities.
• Leverage data and experimentation to continuously improve the product. Analyze performance, test hypotheses, monitor key metrics, and use customer insights to identify and deliver impactful optimizations.
• Take responsibility for talks and negotiations with partners dealing with payment services, while getting to work with experts in the payment space to implement solutions that improve how millions pay.
• Research the best solutions in the payments market. Keep up to date with the latest trends and developments and build cases for projects that can move the business forward.
• Drive conversion rate optimisation as it relates to online payments.
• Work with business owners to understand their strategy, requirements, and priorities in order to translate their needs into projects for payments.
• Defining/tracking the metrics and data that will inform all decisions on product features and functionality.
• Analysing and understanding the project scope and core objectives through workshops with stakeholders to define business requirements.
• Eliciting low-level functional requirements and documenting these requirements such that detailed technical specifications can be compiled by Engineering.
• Collaborate with technical lead and subject matter experts to establish the technical vision and analyse trade-offs between usability and performance needs.
• Evolve appropriate Product Management practices for a responsive, dynamic environment to foster effective execution of commitments.
• Be proactive in ensuring that the development and QA teams understand the requirements by attending backlog grooming and sprint planning sessions and initiating functional clarification sessions where needed.
• Setting timelines, driving project schedules, and leading cross-functional development teams from design through to release.
• Review the test plan and test scripts to ensure quality and coverage.
• Performing user acceptance testing.

The skills we need:

• Vision & Strategic Thinking: You’re skilled at defining a clear, ambitious product vision and translating it into a cohesive strategy across multiple teams. You know how to craft compelling narratives, strategic documents, and product requirements that align stakeholders, inform decisions, and inspire action. You are equally comfortable zooming out to shape long-term direction and diving deep into the details to ensure executional excellence.
• Product Craft & Execution: You bring extensive experience envisioning, building, and scaling customer-facing products—ideally in an online marketplace or  e-commerce context. You have a proven track record of delivering impact through exceptional product thinking, strong execution, and a deep understanding of what it takes to ship and scale successful digital experiences.
• Customer-Obsessed Problem Solving: You lead with curiosity and empathy, constantly seeking to understand user needs, pain points, and behaviors. You are experienced in product discovery and know how to turn insights into meaningful, innovative solutions that solve real problems—for both customers and partners—while driving measurable business outcomes.
• Commercial and Market Acumen: You use data, user insights, and competitive intelligence to assess opportunities and make informed decisions. You understand how to balance customer value and commercial impact, and you prioritize work that drives both strategic growth and operational efficiency.
• Analytical Rigor: You are data-literate and insight-driven, with the ability to interpret both quantitative and qualitative signals. You define success metrics, design experiments, and track performance to inform decisions and continuously improve the product.
• Thoughtful Leadership: You lead with humility, curiosity, and conviction. You have experience mentoring and developing product talent, fostering a high-performing, customer-focused culture. You advocate for excellence, drive innovation, and inspire teams to do their best work.
• Solution-oriented, accountable, highly motivated and have a robust personality.
• The ability to take initiative in ambiguous situations, by identifying critical problems and driving solutions.
• Data-driven decision-making with good story telling skills.
• Outstanding organisational and communication skills and the ability to balance multiple priorities

Qualifications & Experience:

• Minimum bachelor’s degree, preferably in engineering
• At least 7 years product management experience preferably in eCommerce/online retail/payments with 2-4 in product leadership/strategic role
• Needed strong strategic thinking and product discovery experience — you’re not just executing, you’re setting vision and direction.
• Needed experience in discovering and leading cross functional product initiatives.

Let’s talk about life @ Takealot Group

• The power is in your hands: We offer a market-related, Total Remuneration Package that allows full flexibility according to your needs. Go on, be the master of your own destiny.
• No doors: We aren’t fans of stuffy offices or siloed work environments. See someone you like? High five, collab and make something great.
• Remote working: Love water cooler chats and working from home? Takealot.com offers a hybrid working model for the best of both worlds.
• Mentorship programme: We aren’t kidding when we say the people with the best people win. Now’s your chance to be one of the best, by learning from the best.
• Naspers Tech Community & Online Learning: Share ideas and grow with global industry leaders who are all just a Slack message away. Love to learn? Up-skill with free access to courses on MyAcademy, Udacity, Coursera, and more.
• Good times: Get to know the other extraordinary minds at takealot.com during regular social events and out-of-office activities (think hikes, think mini golf, think good times).
• Staff discount. Millions of products across 28 departments. What more could you ask for?
• Birthday leave: Cake Day all the way. Enjoy your day off - you deserve it. 
• Right tools, right job: We work on Mac, but whether you prefer two monitors or one. You’ll work on the latest tech, with the latest tech.
• Help when you need it most: Confidential counseling, legal support, and financial guidance, for free, anytime, anywhere. 
• Tech stack (for days): Angular, Scala, Kotlin, Google Cloud, Kafka, Redis, Kubernetes and all things machine learning. If you build it, they will come.
• Free parking: No more 5km fun runs to your desk (unless you want to). 

If you meet the above you are an Extraordinary Mind so come and join us and show millions of shoppers what you can do!  

Takealot is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We encourage applicants from previously disadvantaged groups and people with disabilities, to apply.