🎯 The Mission
Direct Lending is a fast-growing, award-winning lending fintech on a mission to empower people’s lives with simple and responsible financing. Having built a sustainable, profitable foundation, we are now entering a scaling-up phase. Our roadmap is clear: scale our needs-based financing, grow our revenue 5X and become IPO-ready by 2030.
We are looking for a Head of Product to be a partner to the Founder. Your mission is to build the "Product Machine" – transforming our product team into outcome-owners, co-own product roadmap, bridging the gap between high-level commercial vision and rigorous technical execution, ensuring our products are frictionless for users, technically sound for engineers, and rigorously compliant for regulators.
At Direct Lending, your success isn't measured by how many features you ship, but by the measurable impact your products have on our customers' lives and our company’s growth.
✨ Why Join Us?
- A Career-Defining Journey: You will be the architect of the product ecosystem that takes us toward a 2030 IPO. This is your legacy-building role.
- True Autonomy: Reporting directly to the founder, you will have the mandate to design the product culture, team and systems from the ground up.
- Speed as a Competitive Advantage: If you are tired of "death by committee" and endless bureaucracy, you’ll find our pace refreshing. We are a lean team where decisions are made in hours, not months. You will have the direct mandate to experiment, iterate, and execute without the corporate red tape.
💼 Your Core Responsibilities/Pillars
1. The "What" (Data-Led Strategy & Roadmap)
- Founder Partnership: Partner directly with the Founder to co-own the product roadmap.
- Hypothesis-Driven Culture: Transition the team from "request-based" building to a data-validated mindset: "Based on X data/insight, we believe building Y will result in Z outcome."
- Strategic Piloting: Identify and lead the launch of new product opportunities from initial concept to market-ready pilot.
2. The "Experience" (UX & Metrics)
- Invisible Financing: Own the end-to-end customer and merchant journey, obsessing over friction removal to make financing feel seamless and trustworthy.
- Product Analytics: Establish the framework for "metrics that matter." Move the team beyond vanity metrics to focus on conversion, time-to-disbursement and unit economics.
- Feedback Loops: Introduce a structured cadence of user testing and merchant feedback to ensure we are building for the user, not just for the requirements.
3. The "Machine" (Agile Leadership & Governance)
- Leader of Leaders: Manage and mentor a team of four, elevating their thinking from "executing tasks" to "owning outcomes."
- Velocity with Discipline: Implement Lean/Agile frameworks that prioritize speed-to-market while maintaining the documentation required for a scalable organization.
- Outcome over Output: Ensure the team understands the commercial "Why" behind every sprint. Success is measured by business impact, not the volume of features shipped.
4. The "Bridge" (Technical Commerciality & Compliance)
- Tech Partnership: Work alongside the CTO and tech team to ensure technical feasibility and scalability.
- Compliant by Design: Ensure every product logic flow is robust and respects regulatory requirements. You understand that in fintech, accuracy is a prerequisite for speed.
- Strategic Depth: You have the "zoom lens" to navigate high-level strategy and then dive deep into critical logic or compliance details when the stakes are high.
✅ Who You Are
- The "Data-Fluent" Builder: You use data to validate your intuition, not to replace it. You can navigate messy datasets to extract a clear product direction and identify the "metrics that matter" for 5x growth.
- User-Centric & Commercial: You have a "conversion-first" mindset. You can sit with a designer to simplify a complex journey and then sit with a developer to ensure the API logic supports that seamless experience.
- Technical Translator: You can talk APIs, system architecture, and logic flows with engineers, ensuring the commercial vision is never "lost in translation."
- Outcome-Driven Mentor: You don't just manage tasks; you grow people. You have a proven ability to coach teams to focus on the commercial "Why" and prioritise business outcome over simple feature outputs.
- Scientifically Pragmatic: You know when to obsess over a 0.1% edge case (Compliance/Logic) and when to "ship and iterate" (UX/UI) to maintain market velocity.
- Agile Fintech Experience: You have a background in complex digital journeys (Fintech, E-commerce, or SaaS) and understand the discipline required in a regulated environment.