Product Owner - Inventory and Waste Management

About Greenspoon

Greenspoon is one of Kenya's fastest expanding online supermarkets, delivering fresh, healthy groceries directly to customers' doorsteps daily. We aim to build East Africa's largest online supermarket offering a wide selection of organic fruits, vegetables, quality meats, freshly baked breads, and more, combined with great service and affordable pricing. With a strong commitment to sustainability as a certified B Corp, we stand alongside global brands renowned for their social and environmental impact. Our young and driven team thrives on integrity, quality, and making a positive difference.

Role Overview

As a senior product owner, you will take full responsibility for the inventory and waste management product suite. This includes overseeing stock lifecycle processes—procurement, receiving, put-away, inter-site transfers, stock counting, and waste management—across multiple sites. You will also manage the automation tools supporting these processes, such as purchase order optimization, receiving, stock count, and fresh produce applications, aimed at ensuring that system records accurately reflect physical stock.

Responsibilities

• Manage ordering processes by defining what to buy, in what quantity, and when, adjusting logic based on location, season, and product category to optimize availability and working capital.
• Design and improve receiving and put-away procedures including sell-by date capture, batch labelling, scanning, and resolving discrepancies between deliveries and paperwork.
• Oversee site-to-site stock transfers ensuring accurate reconciliations and documented reasons for any variances.
• Transition stock counting from an occasional event to a consistent practice that validates existing data rather than revealing unexpected discrepancies.
• Implement systems to track expiry dates, temperature controls, and proactively identify short-dated items before they reach customers; enable traceability to vendors and batches for quality issues.
• Own and enhance the usability and reliability of receiving, stock counting, and fresh produce apps used by frontline employees, including the supporting hardware such as scanners, printers, and scales.
• Engage directly with warehouse operations by spending significant time on-site to understand real workflows and gather insights for continuous improvements.
• Set strategy and roadmap in collaboration with executive leadership; write product specifications; prioritize feature backlogs; work closely with engineering teams to deliver solutions; measure and report impact using appropriate metrics.
• Build internal tools primarily in-house, leveraging AI where feasible to prototype and implement incremental improvements rapidly.
• Identify recurring issues and implement permanent fixes rather than temporary workarounds to prevent reoccurrence.
• Ensure high adoption rates for all developed tools and processes by addressing user needs and resistance effectively.

Candidate Requirements

• Proven 5 to 10 years experience in demanding environments such as strategy consultancy, investment banking, or leadership positions within corporate, startup, or scale-up companies.
• Experience working in product teams or strong enthusiasm for product management roles.
• Demonstrated history of shipping internal tools or operational software, ideally serving supply chain, warehouse, inventory, or merchandising functions.
• Background in e-commerce, retail, grocery sectors, logistics, warehousing or related software development; perishables experience is advantageous.
• Strong understanding of replenishment concepts including reorder points, safety stocks, lead times, minimum order quantities, seasonality, and service levels, with experience setting these parameters and measuring their outcomes.
• Experience managing product catalogues or master data including SKU organization, hierarchies, barcoding, units of measure, and pricing structures.
• Accountability for stock availability, stock accuracy, shrinkage, or waste metrics rather than just reporting them.
• Comfort with commercial impact of shrinkage, waste, gross margin effects, and inventory carrying costs.
• Technical literacy including SQL, data modeling, and strong opinions on effective system architecture; ERP experience preferred, especially with Dynamics 365 Business Central.
• Strong analytical and structural thinking to design systems eliminating persistent problems instead of repeatedly fixing symptoms.
• Ability to make decisions with incomplete information and take full ownership of outcomes.
• Excellent listening skills, humility, and willingness to be hands-on working on-site early mornings when necessary.

Success Measures After 12 Months

• Eliminate the need for private spreadsheets by earning trust in the inventory system.
• Zero shipments reaching customers past their sell-by or expiry date.
• Quantifiable improvements in stock accuracy, reduction in waste percentage of sales, improved availability, and decrease in inventory working capital.
• High voluntary usage rates of receiving, counting, and fresh produce tools demonstrating greater efficiency versus manual workarounds.

Important Notes

• This is a product ownership role requiring prior experience managing product backlogs, writing specs, prioritizing work, and shipping with engineering teams—applicants lacking these will struggle.
• No pre-set roadmap exists for this area; you will develop plans independently and lead direction setting.
• Expect a fast-paced environment valuing quick iterative delivery over perfect solutions.