Head, Platform Partnerships at NCBA Group

JOB PURPOSE STATEMENT

Digital Business is implementing its open platform strategy to simplify development on our products. This role is designed build the DevRel (Developer Relations) team to connect with, inspire, and educate developers on the power of our platform.

This is a highly visible and prestigious role responsible for establishing and leading the team that builds awareness and supports our Community. You will help make it easy for developers to benefit from our tools, expand channels for our community to provide feedback that informs our products and documentation, ignite and cultivate communities and inspire influencers to become raving fans. You will also focus on driving the adoption of our products and services across the markets. 

In its essence, Platform Partnerships includes:

• Developer Advocacy: Understanding the developer needs from the product and promoting them internally within the company.
• Developer Evangelism: Zealously promoting the discussion about our problem space (building authorization), and our open-source + SaaS solutions for it.
• Partner Integrations: Assisting customers draw up requirements and select the correct products and services.

KEY ACCOUNTABILITIES (DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES)

Financial (20%)

• Drive commercial impact through API and Mini App integrations.
• Monitor and review API, and Mini App performance, and apply intervention strategies that lead to achievement of business growth.
• Partner with Product and Engineering to uncover technology operating models with favourable unit economics

Internal Business Processes (30%)

• Disrupt the status quo by breaking down functional barriers and aligning the company for long-term growth.
• Influence and coordinate internal decision-making and prioritization within and between group stakeholders to execution of the unit’s strategic initiatives involving partners and markets.
• Evaluate and mitigate all risks related to activities with strategic partners and across geographic territories; including market changes, internal and external communication, and institutions
• Co-ordinate standardization, alignment, and contextualization efforts of Partner Management policies and procedures. Lead the development and review of the same to achieve 100% adherence to policies, procedures and statutory guidelines.
• Partner consistently with Product, Delivery and Engineering leaders to present the company’s teams as one team in front of partners and markets’ stakeholders

Customer (40%)

• View developer interactions as B2D (Business to Developer) and D2B (Developer to Business) interactions.
• Accountable for short-term, medium-term and long-term strategic initiatives, partnerships, products, marketing and sales to optimise growth.
• Craft a robust customer value management strategy for developers that allows the company to build deep developer insights coupled with face-to-face encounters at hackathons, demo days, community events, and meetings and lead a market focused CVM center of excellence.
• Motivate the developers to engage in transactions continuously and continue their relationship with our brand in order to drive retention.
• Build and influence internal and external stakeholder relationships that position the company as a trusted collaborator for innovative digital financial services solutions; thus creating both economic and reputational value.
• Facilitate the design and execution of market communication to influence customer and stakeholder opinions.
• Maintain a deep knowledge of the FinTech industry and adjacent markets and keep close relationships with relevant stakeholders

Learning & Growth (10%)

• Training and coaching of DevRel personnel.
• Evoke creative and innovative thinking from team members while helping them to bring their ideas and career plans to fruition.
• Identify and develop competencies in assigned role.
• Promote a learning culture by champion new ways of working in the unit

JOB SPECIFICATIONS

Academic:

• An undergraduate degree or its equivalent in Engineering, Computer Science or related field.

Desired work experience:

• A minimum of 8 years of relevant professional experience in highly automated environment, including at least 3 years in Software Engineering, Solution Architecture, or DevRel related areas.

JOB COMPETENCIES

Technical Competencies

Platform Partnerships Governance:

• Establish the DevRel role and operating model (e.g. centralized or decentralized, areas of focus).
• Set standards for DevRel capabilities, including certifications and qualifications 
• Work with Product Management, Design and Engineering to bring feedback to make our products, services and documentation better and also support product releases with developer/devtester education collateral.
• Work with our Marketing organization to plan and help create engaging developer content for our blog, videos, social media, and other outlets.
• Create a ‘Centre of Excellence’ to nurture DevRel practitioners and share knowledge of industry best practices.
• Monitor compliance with policies and standards.

Platform Partnerships Team Leadership:

• Oversee the delegation of work to DevRel Engineers, DevRel Community Builders, and Solution Architects.

Developer Advocacy

• Enable developers to successfully leverage your platform and APIs while advocating for their requirements to internal product teams by acting as a liaison between the greater community and the various internal product teams.
• Capable of juggling multiple complex documentation tasks with little or no oversight, while also working effectively within a documentation team to support varying workloads.
• Care deeply about and are always thinking of new ways to boost other developers’ productivity, experience, and well-being. You will build and maintain libraries and code samples for developers.

Developer Evangelism

• Define cross-functionally and implement a roadmap of exciting events, hackathons, education initiatives, workshops, meetups, and focused sessions, including keynotes and speakers at industry and branded events to help developers evaluate our capabilities and learn how to contribute to community-driven innovation.
• Participate on sponsorship of partner events to promote our brand. Animate the developer community around the product, collect feedback, and interact with core product teams.
• Drive the efforts of formalizing and scaling our developer funnel by referring great candidates for expanding our Engineering talent.

Solution Architecture

• Relate directly with customers to identify the right products to meet their needs.
• Good appreciation of modern software engineering practices e.g. chaos engineering, infrastructure as code, microservices (REST/SOAP/GraphQL, gRPC), DevOps etc
• Have an expert understanding of different design patterns across structure, behaviour, build, and creation.

Training and capacity building:

• Build a small team of DevRel advocates/evangelists and make progress on your DevRel strategic plan, engaging various communities around the world
• Provide advice and support to project management practitioners on how to embed best practices of project and programme governance, risk management, project and programme management
• Strengthen the knowledge, skills and career development of the platform partnerships team.
• People and skills – identify skills and competence shortages to deliver the portfolio of changes and recommend suitable development.
• Extend project management advice and support to hosted entities and other relevant partners to promote open innovation.

Behavioral Competencies

• Interpersonal Skills: Ability to lead, build and influence motivated teams
• Emotional Intelligence : Knows own strengths and limits; aware of own emotions and the effect they have on others and has the self-control to keep disruptive emotions and impulses in check.
• Social and Cross-cultural Awareness: Interacts with colleagues, customers, and other stakeholders in different social and cultural environments, showing respect and positive regard for them in an ethical and appropriate that are consistently with the values of the organization.
• Agile: Able to change plans, methods, opinions or goals in light of new information, with the readiness to act on opportunities. Highly effective in adapting to differing environments. Inculcates a digital mind-set in the organization, institutionalizing cross-functional collaboration, flattening hierarchies, devolving decision making to smaller teams, and building environments that creatively partnering with external companies to extend necessary capabilities to encourage the generation of new ideas and developing more iterative and rapid ways of doing things. Implements incentives and metrics to support such agility.
• Leadership Skills: Team Building and ability to train, develop and mentor staff; Presents new challenges and opportunities to the team to enable them to demonstrate and achieve their full potential; encourages and inspires team learning
• Negotiation Skills: Must be a good negotiator, particularly in changing behaviour and work practices but always achieve a Win/Win outcome
• Innovative: Creative and adaptive to change. A team player who is supportive of other’s ideas and innovations, collaborates in a culture of knowledge-sharing and team learning to strengthen the organization’s work