Senior Product Manager

Cape Town or Johannesburg-Based | Scale-Up | Full-time, Permanent | Product Machine | Hiring Manager: Dawie van der Westhuizen

Jem is hiring a Senior Product Manager to own a major area of our product, drive measurable commercial outcomes through it, and help us reinvent what product management looks like in an AI-native company.

Jem is a fast-growing HR tech scale-up building payroll, HR, and benefits tools for frontline teams. We support deskless workforces across South Africa and are scaling rapidly. We have proven that WhatsApp clocking works at scale, are expanding into rostering, and are embedding AI into both how we build product and what the product itself does for customers.

This is a senior, hands-on role. You will own roadmap and delivery for a defined product area (HR Services, Operations, or Benefits), partner directly with engineering, design, sales, and customer teams, and treat AI as a first-class input to every decision and a first-class output in the product. You will operate as a peer on the Product leadership bench.

This role suits someone who has shipped product that moved commercial numbers, writes specs that engineering trusts, gets in front of real users without being asked, and is already using AI to compress the loop between insight and shipped feature.

⭐️ Your Mission

• Own a major product area end to end: discovery, prioritisation, specification, delivery, and post-launch iteration, with measurable impact on gross profit and client retention.
• Embed AI natively into both how product gets built and what the product does for customers, in ways that are usable, attractive, and trusted.

⭐️ What Success Looks Like

• The area of the roadmap you own is trusted across the business. The right things are being built, in the right order, for the right reasons.
• What ships is tied to gross profit, retention, or activation, and tracked against those numbers post-launch.
• Engineering sprints run cleanly because specs are clear and decisions are made before work starts, not during it.
• Customer insight is continuous and structured, feeding the roadmap in near real time rather than as a quarterly event.
• AI is visible in two places: in how product decisions get made (feedback synthesis, prioritisation modelling, spec drafting, usage monitoring) and in the product customers experience.
• The gap between "we know what customers need" and "it is live in production" shrinks every quarter.

⭐️ What You'll Do

Own a product area

• Take a major area of Jem's product (HR Services, Operations, or Benefits) and run it end to end.
• Maintain a roadmap for that area, with every item carrying a defined outcome, a DRI, and a clear reason it sits ahead of what was deprioritised.
• Make prioritisation calls under incomplete information, defend them with commercial logic, and revisit them as evidence changes.

Discovery and customer insight

• Get in front of real users regularly: site visits, ride-alongs, structured interviews, support shadowing.
• Synthesise signal from customer success, sales, support, and field interactions into a continuous, actionable input to the roadmap.
• Use AI to aggregate qualitative feedback at scale, surface patterns across hundreds of interactions, and shorten the path from raw signal to product decision.

Delivery enablement

• Write specifications that are clear, complete, and unambiguous before engineering picks them up.
• Partner closely with engineering on story shaping, acceptance criteria, and sprint goals.
• Own the handoff between discovery and delivery so nothing falls into the gap between "we decided to build this" and "we actually built it."

AI-native product

• Champion the vision for how AI is embedded in your product area as a core part of the experience, not a feature layer.
• Reimagine workflows from the ground up: ask what the experience should look like if AI did the heavy lifting, not how to automate a single step.
• Help customers transition to working in an AI-native way through interfaces that build their capability and confidence.

Cross-functional partnership

• Keep Revenue, Operations, and customer-facing teams informed on roadmap direction, upcoming releases, and trade-offs that affect client commitments.
• Show up in product forums prepared, with decisions recorded and follow-through tracked.
• Make customer-facing teams able to speak credibly to your roadmap in client conversations.

Performance and iteration

• Define and track product metrics that matter: feature adoption, activation, engagement depth, gross profit contribution.
• Iterate or cut underperforming features. Do not let strategic and technical debt accumulate.
• Build feedback loops from post-launch data back into prioritisation so decision quality compounds.

⭐️ You'll Thrive Here If You

• Have shipped product that moved commercial numbers, and can show what you owned, what shipped, and what it changed.
• Write specs that engineers want to pick up.
• Get in front of users without being told to.
• Already use AI in your own workflow in ways that go beyond writing better prose: feedback synthesis, prototyping, decision modelling, agent-assisted discovery.
• Make prioritisation calls under uncertainty and defend them with commercial reasoning, not consensus.
• Care about edge cases and exceptions, because that is where operational software wins.
• Want to shape a product function on a steep growth curve, not inherit a settled one.

⭐️ Requirements

• 6 to 10 years in product management, including at least 3 years owning a defined product area at a B2B SaaS company.
• Demonstrated commercial outcomes from product work: gross profit, retention, activation, or revenue moved as a result of what you shipped, with artefacts you can walk us through.
• Strong written communicator. Specs, decision docs, and customer briefs that engineering, design, and revenue teams trust.
• Track record of running discovery at depth: regular customer time, structured synthesis, decisions traceable to evidence.
• Active, evidenced use of AI in your own product workflow. You can show us what you do, what it replaces, and what would break if it went away.
• Comfort operating in a fast-moving, high-ownership environment with imperfect data, exception-heavy workflows, and a small senior team.
• South Africa based, with comfort travelling to client sites and our offices.

⭐️ What You Can Expect From Us

• Hybrid work environment with a 3-day office policy in our Cape Town or Johannesburg office.
• Competitive salary, calibrated to senior PM level in the South African market.
• A peer seat on the Product leadership bench, with a clear path to expand scope as the function grows.
• Direct line into Engineering, Revenue, Operations, and the exec team. What you ship gets seen by the people who depend on it.
• A product area large enough to move the company's numbers, and small enough that the work you do is visible.
• A salary range of R85,000 - R110,000 per month (not including benefits), depending on experience and role fit.
• We respond to all applications. You can expect feedback on your application, even if we decide not to move forward.