Director of Product: Growth and Customer Engagement

Title: Director of Product: Growth and Customer Engagement

Location:

Primary office location: Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Open to APAC-based candidates

Terms:

Permanent – Full time

Function:

GoTymeX Product

Reporting line:

Head of Product

Director of Product: Growth and Customer Engagement

Who We Are:

We are building and operating multi-country digital banks across emerging markets in Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Our mission is to transform financial services through technology — creating seamless, secure products that change how millions of people interact with money.

Today, our products interact with more than 20 million customers across GoTyme Bank South Africa and GoTyme Bank Philippines. To put that into context, that’s more than a third of all bankable South Africans onboarded since launching in 2019, and a fifth of all bankable Filipinos have joined us within just 3 years of operations.

Our Directors of Product are the senior leaders who define our product-led vision and bring it to life. They don't just manage roadmaps — they drive customer and business objectives by launching and directing product growth, govern cross-market portfolios, and make the architectural and commercial decisions that determine how our products scale across geographies.

You will bring deep conviction that growth, personalisation and loyalty are not downstream functions that react to product decisions — they are core to the product experience itself and must be structurally tethered to it.

About the Role

This is a senior product leadership role responsible for the Growth and Customer Engagement portfolio — one of the most cross-cutting and strategically complex portfolios in the organisation.

The Director of Product owns the portfolio-level strategy, operating model, and delivery governance across all three pods. This is not a single-product role — it is a portfolio leadership role that requires balancing competing priorities across multiple countries, entities, and partner relationships simultaneously.

The portfolio comprises of our products for Insights, Analytics & Personalisation — behavioural analytics, customer-facing AI/ML-driven personalisation, experimentation frameworks; Lifecycle & Notifications — customer lifecycle management, communication orchestration, notification engine logic, and the martech platform that underpins customer engagement across all products and entities; and Loyalty & Rewards — loyalty programme design, gamification, rewards engine architecture, and third-party loyalty platform integration with external strategic partners.

What makes this role distinct:

• Hands-on Product Management in a rapidly growing domain: You will lead a team of Product Managers, UX experts, Business Analysts, Data Scientists, Marketing specialists and Growth Engineers to define and execute our product-led-growth strategies, impacting millions of customers on a daily basis.
• Multi-market, multi-entity complexity: You will lead a portfolio that serves markets at fundamentally different stages of maturity — from scaling and optimisation in one geography to greenfield build and launch in another — each with distinct growth missions, regulatory contexts, organisational structures and strategic partnerships.
• Platform and vendor ownership: You own the commercial and architectural decisions for the portfolio's core platforms — including the engagement/martech stack, loyalty engine, and analytics tooling. This includes vendor evaluation, contract negotiation, build/buy decisions, and multi-instance architecture choices with real commercial and technical trade-offs.
• AI as a portfolio imperative: The portfolio's north star is built around an AI-driven personalisation and experimentation vision. You will lead the integration of AI/ML capabilities into our customer-facing products, not as an innovation sidecar but as the core operating thesis.
• Operating model is key: The central challenge is designing and iterating the structural relationship between Product, Growth, Enablement, and in-country teams. You will make deliberate choices about embedded vs. centralised models, federation vs. central control of lifecycle orchestration, and how platform teams and country execution teams collaborate as markets mature.

Your Mission

• Own the strategy, health, and evolution of the Growth and Customer Engagement portfolio as a key member of the product leadership team
• Push the boundaries of product-led-growth — defining and executing performance strategies to grow our business and improve our customers' banking experience
• Design and continuously improve the multi-market operating model — defining how platform capabilities built centrally are activated, adapted, and governed in each country
• Lead the portfolio's AI and data strategy — ensuring personalisation, experimentation, and behavioural insights are embedded into every product surface, not bolted on as afterthoughts
• Govern the portfolio's external partnerships and vendor relationships at a commercial and architectural level — including joint programme delivery with strategic financial services partners
• Bring domain authority in growth, martech, loyalty, or customer engagement — and use it to make decisions that move faster than consensus

Your Responsibilities

Product strategy leadership

• Drive the experimentation culture and growth loops — framework design, customer-facing product performance, tooling decisions, and the operating rhythm that turns hypotheses into validated learnings at pace
• Define and own the portfolio vision, ensuring strategic coherence across pods that serve markets with different growth missions and maturity levels
• Own the portfolio's contribution to Group-level OKRs and translate these into pod-level outcomes
• Lead the integration of the portfolio's data science and AI/ML team into product delivery — ensuring models, experiments, and insights translate into shipped product changes

Delivery leadership

• Lead and mentor the next generation of Product Managers and teams — providing strategic direction, removing blockers, and holding the bar on product quality and delivery rigour
• Run portfolio-level governance — sprint reviews, pod health checks, dependency management, and escalation to the Chief Product Officer when needed
• Manage portfolio-level resourcing — including headcount planning, attrition risk, leave cover, and onboarding of new team members (including data science and AI/ML hires)
• Ensure delivery excellence across pods — by leading the operating rhythm, standards, and accountability structures that let pods move fast with confidence

Cross-Functional Leadership

• Partner with Engineering leadership to make decisions about technical direction, architecture, and platform evolution — as a peer, not a requester
• Work with UX Research and Design to identify product and segment-based growth opportunities grounded in customer evidence
• Collaborate with Risk, Compliance, Legal, and Finance stakeholders to navigate regulatory and commercial constraints — particularly in multi-jurisdiction contexts
• Contribute to the evolution of the broader product function — including team building, Ways of Working, recruitment processes, and performance management frameworks
• Lead quarterly strategic planning for the portfolio — including roadmap prioritisation, capacity allocation across pods, and trade-off decisions when resources are constrained

Partnership & Vendor Governance

• Own vendor strategy for the portfolio's platform stack — engagement/martech platform, loyalty engine, analytics tooling — including commercial negotiation, architectural decisions (e.g., single vs. multi-instance), and contract review
• Make build/buy/partner decisions with clear commercial and technical rationale, and manage the implications through to deliver

Requirements:
Your Skills and Experience

Required:

• 8+ years in product management, with at least 3 years in a managerial role leading a portfolio of multiple product teams (not a single product or squad)
• Proven experience in multi-market or multi-entity product leadership — you have navigated the complexity of serving different geographies with different needs from a shared platform capability
• Deep domain expertise in growth, engagement, lifecycle, loyalty, or personalisation — you have built and scaled at least one of these functions, not just contributed to it
• Platform and vendor management experience — you have owned commercial relationships with martech, engagement, or loyalty platform vendors, including contract negotiation and architectural trade-offs
• Data and analytics leadership — you have managed or closely partnered with data science / analytics teams and can govern metric definitions, experimentation frameworks, and reporting across organisational boundaries
• External partnership experience — you have co-managed a strategic partnership or joint programme with a large external organisation at a senior level
• Strong people leadership — you have built, mentored, and retained product teams through ambiguity, attrition, and growth

Preferred:

• Background in fintech, digital banking, or financial services — with an understanding of regulated product environments
• Experience working within or alongside martech, personalisation platforms and loyalty engines at an architectural level
• Experience with AI/ML product integration — not as a technologist, but as a product leader who knows how to direct AI capabilities toward customer outcomes
• Familiarity with multi-country operating models in emerging markets — particularly Southeast Asia or Sub-Saharan Africa
• Comfort operating in a high-growth, high-ambiguity environment where the operating model itself is still being shaped

Top 5 Reasons to Join

• Shape the growth model for a multi-country digital banking group at scale — not just optimise conversion funnels, but design the operating system that connects pro