Job Title: Product Officer
Location: Rongo, Kenya
Start date: April, 2025
Reporting to: Product Manager

Organizational Background

Founded by a group of committed Kenyans, Lwala unlocks the potential of communities to advance their own comprehensive well-being and improve health outcomes. We support communities to design, implement, and evaluate solutions to their most pressing health challenges. To address systemic inequities in health outcomes–and a health system that often leaves communities out of decision-making–Lwala deploys a community-led health model that has 4 pillars: professionalized community health workers (CHWs), community health committees, health facilities, and data. Lwala is an organization rooted in the communities we serve. When it comes to improving health outcomes, we believe that communities should be in the driver's seat–no one can identify challenges and solutions better than communities themselves. Our model centers communities as leaders and change-makers breaking cycles of inequity.

Job Summary

Lwala Community Alliance is seeking to employ a dedicated and skilled Product Officer to provide high quality technical support and training to end users of our flagship digital health technologies. The ideal candidate should have a strong background in digital health tools and data systems within the not-for-profit sector, ensuring effective digital adoption while promoting data integrity and evidence-based decision-making.

This role involves providing professional and ethical technical support to Community Health Promoters (CHPs) using Lwala’s digital platforms, including Lwala Mobile, a CommCare-based job aid for CHPs, and eCHIS, a nationally deployed community health tool. The Product Officer will ensure compliance with digital policies, conduct daily data quality assessments, and mentor CHPs to enhance data integrity at the source.

An understanding of Monitoring & Evaluation (M&E) principles is critical, given the significant role digital data plays in Lwala’s learning ecosystem. The Product Officer will be at the forefront of ensuring data quality, translating field experiences into actionable insights, influencing decision-making, and contributing to the continuous improvement of digital functionality.

We are particularly interested in candidates with experience in public health and implementing mHealth technologies in low-resource settings.

Key Responsibilities

Product management and delivery

• Participates in the Agile sprint process, and ensures that all scrums meetings and practices are adhered to
• Manages a team to work towards the delivery of required outcomes
• Works with stakeholders in achieving the objectives set and ensures that the functionality and final product meet the stakeholders expectations and is able to
• Collaborate with the technical teams to plan, execute and oversee the implementation of eCHIS within supported Counties
• New Responsibility: Develop and oversee product roadmaps and release plans to ensure project timelines align with strategic goals..

Stakeholder engagement and management

• Act as a liaison between the County and Sub-County Health Management Teams, Community Health Assistants, Community Health Workers and the technical teams.
• Conduct user feedback activities and engage with stakeholders in the ecosystem to improve system functionality and usability.
• Update stakeholders at county and sub-county level on eCHIS product roadmap and release schedule.
• Update the Product Manager on progress of activities and effectively communicate needs to ensure smooth implementation and support.
• New Responsibility: Represent the organization in government and partner meetings, advocating for scaling digital health systems at the sub-county and county levels.

System support and data quality assurance

• Perform regular system testing and quality checks to identify and address any issues within the systems in use by Lwala and County teams including Commcare, eCHIS, Kobo collect and others
• Develop, update and maintain standard operating procedures for the systems to ensure quality and availability is maintained
• Conduct regular data quality checks with the field teams to identity gaps and instigate corrective measures
• Maintain detailed records of system configurations, updates, and issues with adequate communication to relevant stakeholders and teams
• Provide technical support and troubleshoot issues related to eCHIS and other relevant systems.
• New Responsibility: Establish a framework for ongoing system performance audits to identify opportunities for optimization and scaling.

Knowledge management and training Support

• Generate and present regular reports on system performance, system use and user satisfaction.
• Ensure results, insights, summaries are well highlighted, captured and documented and disseminated to relevant stakeholders for improvement of outcomes.
• Conduct CHU Digital maturity assessment for the CHUs quarterly, document and share findings.
• Develop training materials and conduct training sessions for community health workers
• Ensure complete compliance with internal data governance policies and strategies
• Contributes significantly to content and updates of Lwala’s internal Confluence Knowledge base.
• Create training materials and job aids
• Support the improvement of existing tools and processes in keeping with growing organizational needs and user feedback to ensure the organization remains on the cutting edge of innovation.
• New Responsibility: lead the design of training programs tailored to different user groups, from technical users to non-technical stakeholders.

Qualifications and Experience

• A degree in degree in Economics, Statistics, Computer Science, Health Informatics or related field
• Recent experience (last three years) working in an information systems or digital health project
• Experience working with software engineers
• Strong ability to communicate with and manage multiple stakeholders
• Experience building business cases and driving outcome oriented product prioritization decisions
• Experience designing product roadmaps, work plans and working collaboratively with teams to execute
• Experience in quantitative and qualitative methods involving basic data analysis and report writing skills.
• Critical thinking, creative problem solving and analytical reasoning skills
• Tech savvy, proficient in MS Office and G-Suite (Excel, PowerPoint and Google Sheets)
• Effective communicator with attention to detail and ability to work with a team
• You will particularly impress us if you have experience working with SQL, have Product Management experience or Certification.

Characteristics

• Visionary innovator - The individual must be able to build a strategy and vision for sustainable, right-sized, and high-quality digital tools that contribute to strong local community health systems.
• Commitment to impact – The individual should be passionate about Lwala’s mission and the population we serve, and relentless in pursuit of generating evidence and learning to understand our impact as we test our community-based innovations and scale with government and partners.
• Communication skills – Strong written and verbal communication skills are essential, particularly the ability to communicate complex thoughts and ideas simply and effectively and tailor communications to the non-technical audience.
• Ability to create “structure out of nothing” – Strong ability to turn a visual reality or imagined outcome into a codified set of steps, actions, and goals on paper - and keep the team on task for the most important tasks.
• Self-starter – The individual must be a highly motivated self-starter who can creatively ensure that the engagement between different teams (mainly Programs, Research & Learning, and Operations) is cohesive while ensuring that the main decisions are evidence-based.
• Energy, motivation, and stamina - The role can be demanding and, at times, subject to external pressures for timely completion. The candidate must be adaptive, creative, organized, and highly motivated.

How to Apply

Please send your application letter and CV as one attachment to: Product Officer Vacancy

Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis with an application deadline of 7th March 2025.

Lwala Community Alliance is an equal opportunity employer and does not ask for fees at any stage of the recruitment process. Successful candidates must abide by Lwala’s Anti Fraud & Bribery Policy and Safeguarding Policy, including protection of children and