Sr. Staff Product Leader, Digital, Software Control for Emerging Markets

📋 Description

• • As a Sr. Staff Product Leader, Digital, Software & Control for Emerging Markets at ALSO, you will be at the forefront of revolutionizing electric mobility in regions like Africa and India. This pivotal role involves owning the end-to-end definition and successful deployment of product electrical, electronic, data, and control requirements for our innovative small EVs and charging infrastructure. You will translate complex business objectives into clear, actionable product specifications, ensuring our vehicles and supporting systems deliver a reliable, affordable, and delightful experience for riders while maximizing the value of every asset in the market.
• • Your core responsibility will be to define and manage the product requirements stack for critical vehicle systems, including the battery, motor inverter, vehicle controllers, communication controllers, charging energy systems, and cloud IoT platforms. This encompasses translating business goals into precise, testable specifications and acceptance criteria, with a strong emphasis on security and safety protocols.
• • You will be instrumental in shaping the customer-facing aspects of our products. This includes defining rider Human-Machine Interface (HMI) elements, designing intuitive app flows for onboarding, ride management, payments, and support, and optimizing the user experience for charging and battery swap operations. Furthermore, you will dictate the behavior of notifications, fault messaging, and over-the-air (OTA) update processes, ensuring seamless and user-friendly interactions.
• • A significant part of your role will focus on leading the development of asset and finance control features. This involves defining telematics-driven asset states, implementing immobilization and geofencing rules, establishing usage-based restrictions, designing repayment logic, integrating with mobile-money platforms (such as M-Pesa), and managing data interfaces for lenders and insurers. This ensures the financial viability and operational efficiency of our fleet.
• • You will champion the maximization of reuse across the ALSO platform's electrical architecture, firmware services, diagnostics, OTA capabilities, data schemas, and development tooling. This strategic approach will drive efficiency and consistency throughout our product ecosystem.
• • Authoring and managing supplier requirements will be a key duty. This includes writing detailed component-level specifications, defining Development, Verification, and Validation Plans (DVP&R), overseeing Production Part Approval Process (PPAP) gates, and ensuring compliance with all relevant standards and regulations.
• • You will plan and execute rigorous bring-up and validation processes. This involves bench bring-up, subsystem and vehicle-level integration testing, comprehensive performance and range tests, and conducting field pilots under the challenging road, climate, and grid conditions typical of African markets.
• • Operating early fleets will be a crucial phase. You will define pilot maintenance playbooks, establish telemetry dashboards for real-time monitoring, develop alert triage procedures, conduct root-cause analysis for issues, manage parts containment, and determine the cadence for firmware rollouts.
• • You will treat 'Data as a Product,' specifying data models for trips, charge swaps, State of Charge (SoC), State of Health (SoH), and faults. You will define edge versus cloud processing strategies, key performance indicators (KPIs), and analytics that directly drive vehicle availability, Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), and unit economics.
• • Cross-functional leadership is paramount. You will need to foster strong alignment and collaboration between hardware, firmware, cloud, finance, operations, support, and market teams to ensure cohesive product development and deployment.
• • Delivering on time is critical. You will maintain a milestone-based roadmap, proactively manage risks (including potential backsourcing), and ensure the successful landing of spec-complete releases into production and subsequent scale-up phases.
• • This role demands a strategic thinker who can navigate ambiguity, prioritize effectively, and drive complex technical projects to successful completion in a dynamic, emerging market context.