Forward Deployed Product Manager

We're an entrepreneurial team that operates with minimal hierarchy - everyone contributes to a shared mission in unique ways.

The Role

We are growing our technical team to meet accelerating demand from our portfolio. As part of that growth, we are hiring a Forward Deployed Product Manager who will work at the heart of our accelerator — embedded with 3-4 NGO partners at a time, leading product engagements end-to-end, and helping shape how we deliver at scale.

The Forward Deployed Product Manager is half product manager, half forward-deployed consultant. This is not a traditional product management role: you will work directly with our NGO partners from day one. It is a senior, delivery-focused role that sits at the center 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 prototype solutions yourself, such as dashboards, product analytics, mockups, randomized experiments and feature designs, so that decisions are made on something real. You won't write production code: TAF's engineers write and ship that, and your prototypes and requirements are how you hand it off. You are expected to be as comfortable in SQL query 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.

What You'll Do

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 organizations and help releasing the lessons learnt in the public goods that benefit the whole sector

Product & engineering execution (50%)

* Get your hands dirty with partners' platforms and data: prototype dashboards, product analytics, mockups, feature designs and AI evaluations, write ad-hoc SQL (and light Python) to surface trends, run randomized experiments (A/B 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

* Own the full loop from partner need to shipped product to feedback: use prototypes to define what gets built, work with your pod's engineers to ship critical features, and bring partner feedback into the next cycle

Team and talent (ongoing)

* Coach partner organization staff in the process, help upskilling their technical and leadership skills, 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

Who You Are

* You have 5+ years of experience in product management, solutions engineering, or tech consulting, including direct client-facing work: forward-deployed product management, solutions engineering or consulting, with discovery calls, workshops and on-site visits with clients or users, not only with internal teams

* You have worked closely with engineers to ship AI/LLM product features, data pipelines or warehouses, and production APIs, and you can prototype solutions yourself to test an idea or gather requirements before engineers build it

* You can write SQL, navigate a codebase, and prototype dashboards and product analytics. You don't need to write production code

* You have a track record of making decisions based on data: you have used user research, ad-hoc product analytics and randomized experiments (A/B tests) to define problem statements and measure effectiveness, through causal inference 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, behavioral scientists, and NGO program teams — without formal authority over any of them

* You are curious about global development and motivated to work closer to the problem than most tech jobs allow

* You are based in Sub-Saharan Africa or South Asia, in a time zone that overlaps with your partner organizations and TAF's team

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 with your pod's engineers, a dashboard prototyped with a partner

At one year

* You have led 3-4 partner organizations 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 organization 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

Location and engagement

This is a full-time, remote role. You must be based in Sub-Saharan Africa or South Asia.