Product Manager (Personal Shopper Ecosystem)

Takealot.com, a leading South African online retailer, is seeking a highly talented Product Manager (Personal Shopper Ecosystem) to join our dynamic team in Cape Town.

If you have a genuine passion for commerce, community, and scaling ventures from proof-of-concept to market leader, we want you! We are a hyper-growth company looking for smart, innovative, autonomous, and creative individuals to join us. This is your chance to shape a strategic new business venture and share your passion for supporting entrepreneurship in South Africa.

Think you've been challenged before? Think again!

• Scale: 4 million happy shoppers shop online on takealot.com. Show them what you can do. The Personal Shopper Programme is proving successful - and we're about to scale it. This community-based commerce channel enables individuals to earn commission by helping customers shop on Takealot. Show us how you can build the product ecosystem and position Takealot as a people-first, township-enabled brand.
• Learn: Work at the intersection of community commerce, product strategy, vendor management, and scaling infrastructure. Learn from cross-functional leaders across product, engineering, operations, and business leadership.
• Grow: Expand your career in the fast-growing Takealot Group: takealot.com, TFS and Mr D. We like to promote from within: Here's your chance. Shape the operational and digital foundation of a growing, high-impact business venture that is empowering township users. Own the product roadmap and delivery architecture for a programme that's central to the group's emerging-market and financial inclusion strategy. Grow your career as the programme grows, while immersing yourself in the Personal Shopper world.

This position reports directly to the Product Lead (Business Systems).

You will work closely with the Head of Personal Shopper Programme on business priorities and strategy direction.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it:

The Personal Shopper Programme has proved successful as an early stage initiative and is now ready to scale. Your mission is to translate the programme's strategic growth objectives into a clear, executable product roadmap and own delivery of the technology, tools, automations, and integrations needed to support 10x growth.

You will manage the full Personal Shopper ecosystem - from shopper onboarding and activation through to performance management, retention, operational automation, and retail media opportunities. You will collaborate with internal teams and external development partners to identify opportunities, define requirements and deliver practical solutions. You should bring fresh thinking while consistently driving focused execution.

Your immediate priority (first 90 days) is to define a comprehensive product roadmap through the next financial year. You will then drive execution against this roadmap while remaining close to the Personal Shopper experience.

• Build the product roadmap. Translate growth strategy into a prioritised, sequenced roadmap aligned with execution constraints. Define success metrics; track progress against business outcomes (GMV, shopper acquisition, activation, retention, retail media revenue). As your first focus, drive the development of the Personal Shopper app and supporting digital tools, including new features for customer management, sales insights, earnings, training and engagement.
• Champion the Personal Shopper experience. Identify opportunities to evolve the product ecosystem, improve user experience and support programme growth. Conduct discovery on the shopper and customer journeys; identify opportunities to improve onboarding, activation, retention, and monetisation.
• Establish and manage technical partnerships. Define SLAs, scope, escalation paths, and quality standards. Hold 3rd party vendors accountable. Maintain close partnerships with internal Engineering leadership on technical feasibility and long-term scalability.
• Design a clean data strategy. Ensure Personal Shopper-driven orders and trend signals can be clearly heard in the context of broader metrics and reporting frameworks. Work with analytics to isolate Personal Shopper-driven activity. Design dashboards for leadership that accurately reflect programme health, GMV progress, and ROI.
• Identify and eliminate manual, non-scalable processes. Map current operations (commission processing, KYC verification, shopper management). Recommend product solutions or automation that improve productivity, conversion, and scale.
• Unlock retail media revenue. Build the infrastructure for brand-funded campaigns targeting Personal Shoppers. Define features and identify opportunities for collaboration across the broader Takealot Group.
• Own the onboarding process. Work with Design, Engineering, and Risk & Compliance to deliver an enhanced frictionless, compliant flow. Measure and optimise activation funnels post-launch.
• Drive stakeholder alignment. Build effective relationships across operations, community management, marketing, analytics, and engineering. Provide regular updates to leadership. Escalate conflicts rather than get stuck. Coordinate external partners as needed.

Attributes Required:

• Systems thinking: See connections across onboarding, activation, performance, retention, operations, and analytics. A good technical understanding of software development, APIs, data and systems integration.
• Customer obsession: Willing to spend time in the field and conduct user research in township contexts. A hands-on, accountable approach, with the ability to manage competing priorities and drive delivery.
• Execution focus: You own delivery. Comfortable managing timelines and shipping under pressure.
• Ambiguity tolerance: Comfortable discovering problems as you go. Get to 80% clarity and act. Comfortable operating without a defined roadmap or dedicated team, discovering the shape of the problem as you go.
• Problem solver: Solutions-oriented with a bias towards getting things done. Able to separate what's essential from what's nice-to-have.
• Data-driven: Comfortable with SQL, metrics, and quantitative analysis. Use data to inform strategy and validate recommendations.
• Vendor management & technical partnership: Comfortable with external partners and technical trade-offs. This is not standard vendor management.
• Strong communication skills: Able to effectively communicate across technical and business audiences. Able to synthesise multiple perspectives.

Qualifications and Experience:

• Bachelor's degree or Advanced Diploma in a relevant field, or equivalent industry experience. 
• 5+ years of experience in product management, business systems, technology strategy, or similar roles.
• Experience delivering digital products in collaboration with external development partners.
• SQL or database query skills to investigate data discrepancies and understand data architecture.
• Experience with mobile applications, CRM platforms, analytics tools or workflow automation would be advantageous.
• E-commerce, marketplace or retail media experience would be beneficial.
• Experience in emerging markets, particularly in environments with connectivity, affordability or digital literacy constraints, would be an advantage.

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: Mac or Windows, two monitors or one. Whatever your preference, you’ll work on the latest tech, off the latest tech.
• Help when you need it most: Confidential counselling, legal support and financial guidance, for free, anytime, anywhere. 
• Tech stack (for days): ReactJS, Python, Scala, Kotlin, Swift, 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). 

Like what you see? 

If you meet the above you are an Extraordinary Mind. Apply today!!

Takealot is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Applicants from the previously disadvantaged groups and people with disabilities will be given preference.