Technical Product Manager

Job description

## About The Agency Fund The Agency Fund (TAF) is a US non-profit funder-doer that builds projects to expand human agency at scale. We embed engineers and product managers directly inside evidence-based nonprofits across East Africa, South Asia, and beyond — helping them build data infrastructure, run experiments, and scale impact through automation and product thinking. Our small, global team combines expertise in software, AI, social psychology, and development economics, and our community of 200+ partner organizations reaches millions of people annually. 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 Technical 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 TPM 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 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 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 partner's platforms: build dashboards, data pipelines, AI evaluations and production integrations, analyze 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 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 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 the 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, behavioral 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, 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 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 Remote (Sub-Saharan African or South Asia) - Flexible time zone