Technical Product Manager

The Technical Product Manager is a senior, delivery-focused role that sits at the centre of TAF's accelerator work. You will split your time roughly 50/50 between partner-facing and internal-facing work: on one side, building trusted relationships with NGO partners and translating their needs into actionable product roadmaps; on the other, driving execution with TAF's engineering team through structured agile processes.

You will get your hands dirty by building dashboards, scoping data pipelines, designing A/B tests, and unblocking engineers. You are expected to be as comfortable in SQL queries as you are in a partner discovery call. Within 90 days, you should have sufficient agency to run engagements independently. Within a year, you should be training others.

The candidate will have responsibilities across the following functions:

Partner engagement (50%):

• Act as the primary interface with 3-4 NGO partners at any given time (building trust, scoping collaborations, and surfacing pain points through structured discovery).
• Translate partner needs into roadmaps and technical advisory on product, data, evaluation, and experimentation.
• Report back on learnings from partner work, trace patterns across different organisations, and help release the lessons learnt in the public goods that benefit the whole sector.

Product and engineering execution (50%):

• Get your hands dirty with partners' platforms: build dashboards, data pipelines, AI evaluations and production integrations, analyse data to extract trends, run AB tests and perform user research.
• Define and drive product roadmaps across TAF's tools, translating complex partner workflows into clear engineering requirements.
• Run agile sprints with TAF's engineering team.
• Ship critical features and own the full loop from partner need to shipped product to feedback.

Team and talent (ongoing):

• Coach partner organisation staff in the process, help upskill their technical and leadership skills, and help them hire for critical roles.
• Coach and mentor Lighthouse Fellows on how to navigate nonprofit partners, run structured engagements, and operate effectively in a resource-constrained environment.
• Contribute to TAF's internal playbook: document what works, codify engagement frameworks, and help build the institutional knowledge that makes us better over time.

Requirements:

• You have 5+ years of experience in technical product management, solutions engineering, or tech consulting, ideally with both client/consumer-facing and engineering-facing responsibilities.
• You have shipped AI/LLM product features, data pipelines or warehouses, and production APIs, not just managed people who did, but actually built alongside them.
• You can read and write SQL, navigate a codebase, build data pipelines and dashboards.
• You have demonstrated experience using quantitative and qualitative methods to define problem statements, measure effectiveness for causal inference (AB tests, etc. ) or predictive analytics. You can design a study, interpret the results, and present them to a non-technical program director.
• You are fluent in agile: sprints, backlog grooming, estimation, retrospectives.
• You run these processes well even when the team is small, and everyone is wearing multiple hats.
• You can demonstrate you've managed competing stakeholder needs across engineers, behavioural scientists, and NGO program teams without formal authority over any of them.

Bonus points if you have:

• Experience with global development data stacks: ODK, DHIS2 Kobo, Metabase, dbt, or similar.
• Familiarity with the evidence-based development ecosystem: J-PAL, IPA, IDinsight, or similar RCT/MEL contexts.
• Have proven experience of scaling products with data-driven approaches.
• Exposure to GenAI product development evaluation frameworks, prompt engineering, and LLM integrations.
• You have a meaningful track record in a low-resource, mission-driven, or Tech for International Development context.

What Success Looks Like:

At 90 days:

• Fully ramped: you have independent agency with at least two NGO partners, are running your own sprint cadence, and are making decisions without needing to escalate routine calls.
• First quick win delivered: at least one experiment run, a feature shipped, a dashboard built with a partner.

At one year:

• You have led 3-4 partner organisations' engagement end-to-end, producing meaningful technical outcomes that led to tangible improvements for the users they serve
• You are training others - coaching or hiring partner organisation staff and Fellows on how to operate effectively in this context.
• You have meaningfully contributed to how TAF does this work: a framework improved, a process documented, a playbook built.

Skills

agile, product, product manager, scrum, sprint, sql