Head of Production

Role Overview

Lead and manage the entire production function as a standalone business unit. You will be responsible for the production profit and loss, workforce, output quality, cost control, and pacing, ensuring the company can grow twentyfold within two years efficiently and without operational disruption. Starting with a team of over 130 employees, you will be tasked with doubling its size every six months.

Key Responsibilities

• Oversee the production P&L, managing all costs including labor, inventory, bonuses, and floor expenses within assigned budget parameters.
• Direct recruitment, training, performance evaluation, and retention strategies of the full production team; empower supervisors to manage their teams effectively.
• Maintain cost-efficiency in production processes to align with business economic targets; justify investments using data-backed models.
• Strategize and implement scaling plans to increase production capacity by twenty times within two years, designing workflow, supervision structures, and physical layout accordingly.

Who We Seek

An experienced leader who has managed a large production floor or factory with 500 to 1,000 employees, combining sharp operational leadership with hands-on production skills. You think both like a general manager and a production engineer, capable of analyzing financial models and working alongside floor-level staff. You’re skilled at instituting order where none exists, driving high team performance, and maintaining cost controls.

You understand production as a complex, interdependent system where issues in one area manifest in another. You can pinpoint real problems beneath surface symptoms and solve them effectively—be it refining training, adjusting goals, redesigning workflows, or making tough personnel decisions empathetically.

Comfortable owning a bottom line, you balance employee satisfaction with unit economics, demonstrating that efficiency improvements support enhanced compensation. Proficiency in data analytics, spreadsheet modeling, and advanced AI tools is essential to this role.

This position requires you to be hands-on and involved in all production roles initially to gain deep insights that enable strategic hiring and training decisions later. You will build scalable operational structures while avoiding unnecessary management layers.

Company Culture

• Speed: Avoid hindering others’ progress; understand how your work impacts downstream colleagues.
• Teamwork: Be dependable and uphold commitments and deadlines.
• Respect: Act kindly, avoid assuming ill intent, and be mindful of time and cost.
• Initiative: Approach challenges scientifically by focusing on desired outcomes and working backwards.
• Visibility: Maintain transparent communication about timelines and feedback.
• Excellence: Strive for quality in every task, aligning decisions with intended results.

Particularly critical for this role are initiative, excellence, and visibility due to the direct influence decisions have on a large workforce, many paid per piece.

Essential Qualifications and Experience

• Proven success managing large production or factory operations teams of 500 to 1,000 people.
• Hands-on operational experience across all production roles, not limited to supervisory or desk management.
• Strong command of P&L responsibility and financial literacy for building and revising unit economics in spreadsheets.
• Demonstrated ability to recruit and develop production teams, train supervisors, and manage retention effectively.
• Sound judgment to quickly identify and humanely address underperformance or misfits.
• Availability to work onsite in Lagos, Nigeria, consistently present on the production floor.

Desirable Advantages

• Background in manufacturing or factory operations in sectors such as garments, textiles, FMCG, electronics assembly, or large-scale agriculture.
• Experience scaling operations during periods of rapid growth.
• History of close collaboration with senior leadership like founders, managing directors, or plant directors in large organizations.
• Advanced, integrated use of AI technology beyond basic chat applications.
• Proven success in building operational structure within fast-growing or under-managed environments.