Technical Product Manager

Who We Are

We are Okra Solar. We are a tech company with a mission: to bring “Power To The People”. More than 700M people have no access to electricity today, and these are the very same people who are set to be most affected by climate change in the coming decades. We see a future where decentralised energy infrastructure brings opportunity, and continues to be operated and expanded. But existing solutions have a host of deeply entrenched issues that prevent that from happening. This is how we came to develop our solar Mesh Grid technology, which enables households to be energised for a fraction of the cost required by legacy solutions. We build the hardware and software, and we sell it to local energy companies who have the know-how to deploy and provide our tech as an energy service to communities. Our philosophy is simple: getting electricity to remote off-grid communities (and keeping it there) is hard. Our job is to build the best tech we can, to make that job as easy as possible. We’re a tech company, but getting electricity to off-grid people is what drives us - it’s in our bones. We are looking for people who can get behind that mission as passionately as we do.

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Why We Need You

Okra is transforming from a sprouting startup to a post-Series A company delivering on its mission at scale. This is a scary and exciting time where the rubber hits the road. We have a game-changing product that works, now we have to double down and deliver high volumes with high reliability, all while continuously improving and solving our customer’s pain points.

In the past, we all wore many hats, as you must when you’re a sprouting startup. This has been changing, but our Product Management team is still just two people whose time is also split between technical leadership and strategic positions. 

There has never been a full-time Product Manager at Okra. We want you to be the first.

The addition of a full time Technical Product Manager will round out the existing team and help us do justice to the full range of (around 10) products that we offer, giving them the attention they need. You will be assigned 2-3 products from our range that will be yours to drive. These products will be hardware (not software), and it is highly likely that they will be a combination of third party and custom OEM parts. Examples include solar modules, batteries, inverters, modems, and even appliances such as milling machines.

While we don’t expect you to be doing dev work on these products, we want a Product Manager who understands them to a fairly deep technical level, and can communicate confidently with vendors and engineers about requirements, design tradeoffs and market trends. We also want someone who champions the best practices of Product Management related to product feedback, communication, and customer/stakeholder engagement. Your job will be to chart a course for your products to be the best that they can be, improving quality, reducing cost, adding needed features, and innovating to keep us at our current market-leading position in Mesh Grid technology. If this is an exciting prospect to you, we want to hear from you!

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Responsibilities

• Making tradeoffs, prioritising and executing the vision for the products you manage
• Product requirement specification: interpret and translate customer needs into functional requirements
• Champion habits of product management
  • Continuous feedback seeking
  • experimentation
• Interfacing with other internal and external stakeholders, especially:
  • Customers and end-users
  • Commercial and Support teams
  • Manufacturers and component suppliers
• Managing and engaging in feedback throughout the lifecycle of the product

Skills

• Adaptability - we need someone who can manage a fairly wide variety of electrical products
• Strategic intuition - understanding how the industry landscape is evolving, how the product can be positioned.
• Decision making - ability to make tradeoffs across a range of competing forces
• Communication - Ability to not only make the tradeoffs but communicate them effectively with data
• Comfortable and adaptable to a range of data viz and data management tools (e.g. confluence, airtable)
• Ability to use basic hand tools and test measurement equipment - should be comfortable pulling apart a product

Required Experience

• Bachelor degree in relevant engineering or science field (e.g. electrical, mechanical, telecom, physics)
• Previous experience in product management of a hardware product
• Experience in bringing a product from concept to market will be highly valued
• 2+ years of product management experience

Nice to Have

• Leadership and management experience in the context of small squads/teams
• Experience in a startup environment
• Experience with agile rituals in the context of hardware development

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