Head of Product and Technology

Introduction

The Head of Product & Technology is accountable for the full end-to-end of One Cart's product strategy, technology platforms, and technical operations. The role is grounded in servant leadership, high performance, and disciplined execution.

This role requires a leader who sets clear strategic direction, removes organisational and delivery obstacles, enables teams to operate at pace, and holds leaders and teams accountable for outcomes. The role holder is responsible for creating and sustaining a high-performance culture, with unequivocal ownership of delivery commitments, platform stability, and customer impact.

Success in this role depends on strong prioritisation, fast and informed decision-making, and tight alignment between business objectives, product roadmaps, and engineering execution across both basecamp and field operations. This is a role of active leadership and visible ownership.

Product Strategy and Roadmap Management

• Set and communicate the One Cart product vision, strategic direction, and roadmap, ensuring alignment with overall business objectives.
• Establish and govern short-, medium-, and long-term product roadmaps, ensuring prioritisation reflects strategic intent, capacity, and value delivery.
• Hold end-to-end accountability for the product lifecycle, ensuring effective governance from induction through launch, scaling, and optimisation.
• Direct the identification of innovation opportunities through customer insights, market trends, and emerging technologies, ensuring opportunities are evaluated and prioritised appropriately.
• Own and govern product business cases, including value propositions, cost models, and return-on-investment measurement.
• Set standards for customer-centric, data-driven prioritisation across discovery, delivery, and optimisation, ensuring consistent application across teams.
• Ensure the definition and governance of clear problem statements, success metrics, KPIs, and MVP-first delivery models.
• Provide strategic oversight to ensure cross-functional alignment among Product, Engineering, Operations, and Growth, and hold teams accountable for delivering against agreed outcomes

Technology and Engineering Leadership & Platform Scalability

• Own and govern the technology and engineering strategy across platforms, systems, infrastructure, and applications, ensuring sustained alignment with product vision and business objectives.
• Be accountable for end-to-end outcomes relating to platform stability, scalability, performance, and security, with delivery executed through clearly accountable leadership and teams.
• Provide architectural governance by setting decision frameworks and approving key design outcomes, ensuring solutions are sustainable, scalable, and aligned to long-term product and business needs.
• Set, maintain, and enforce engineering standards, automation principles, and modern development practices, holding teams accountable for consistent application and quality outcomes.
• Ensure enterprise-level compliance with data privacy, information security, and internal IT governance frameworks, while maintaining audit-ready, risk-managed environments.
• Direct and govern the application of global technology best practices, ensuring they are appropriately adapted to South African infrastructure, regulatory, and operational realities.
• Own governance and prioritisation of cloud, microservices, and AI/ML adoption, ensuring these capabilities are scaled only where they deliver clear, measurable, and sustained business value.

Technical Support and Service Delivery

• Maintain overall accountability for IT support services across Basecamp and field operations.
• Ensure effective incident, problem, and service management aligned to defined SLAs.
• Oversee user support for hardware, software, networks, and in-house systems.
• Ensure documentation, training materials, and user enablement processes are maintained and up to date.
• Identify recurring technical issues and implement permanent, preventative solutions.

Product Development and Delivery Execution

• Lead cross-functional delivery across Product, Engineering, IT Support, and external vendors.
• Ensure Agile and Lean…