Aceli Africa is a market-enabling facility to mobilize over $600M in private sector lending for agricultural SMEs in Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Zambia by 2025. To achieve this goal, Aceli Africa provides financial incentives to increase the risk appetite of ~40 financial institutions (commercial banks, non-bank financial institutions, and social lenders) to make loans ranging from USD $15K-$1.5M to inclusive agricultural SMEs, while also facilitating technical assistance to SMEs to expand the ability of high-potential businesses to qualify for and manage financing.

Aceli Africa designed its financial incentives using multi-year data and insights about lending trends by various lender types in East Africa. This data provided visibility into the scale and evolution of lending to Aceli’s target segment, into the costs that lenders incur to lend to these enterprises, as well as into loan-level and portfolio-level profitability.

Aceli launched in September 2020 and, to-date, has secured $75M for activities in the five initial focus countries for 2020-25 from multiple donors and development actors, such as the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, IKEA Foundation, Swiss Development Corporation, UK FCDO, and USAID.

Aceli Africa is an initiative of the Global Development Incubator (GDI), a nonprofit incubator of social impact initiatives based in the United States with an affiliated entity based in Kenya.

As of the end of 2023, Aceli has paid out incentives on over 1,500 loans to over 35 lenders in its five countries of operation. Aceli uses a highly customized Salesforce platform to collect lender loan data and determine whether and how much should be paid in incentives  on a monthly and quarterly basis.

Two factors drive the search for this role: i) Acel plans to double the number of loans for review in 2024 and aims to streamline the process and platform; and ii) lender feedback indicates opportunities to improve the lender user experience going forward. This role will complement Aceli’s existing relationship with an external technology partner.

The Salesforce & Product Senior Associate will be Aceli’s lead in i) managing the relationship with our external technology partner; and ii) implementing direct changes in the Salesforce platform so that Aceli is not fully reliant on this third party. This role will sit within the six-person Product & Innovation team and will be the technical resource and Salesforce “owner” within Aceli.

The ideal candidate will have a mix of product management and technical skills. Given the broad range of stakeholders and “clients” (internal and external), this individual will need to be highly customer-centric – someone who genuinely enjoys solving others’ problems and who does so thoughtfully. This role is based in Nairobi, Kenya.

Key Responsibilities

Salesforce Product Management & Feature Development

• Requirements gathering and feature scoping with internal and external users – Define pain points and convert business needs into technical requirements with internal users (the Product team as well as other teams within Aceli) and external users (Aceli lenders).
• Roadmap development and management – Propose feature prioritization based on business/ organizational needs, input from team members, and trade-offs against other organizational goals. This will be done alongside the Head of Product & Innovation and other internal stakeholders.
• User Acceptance Testing – Conduct user acceptance tests alongside other members of the team for externally-developed features (i.e., by our contracted Salesforce partner) to confirm the quality of the development work / its alignment against Aceli and user expectations.
• Code reviews / audits – Lead periodic code reviews to ensure that our code reflects any new changes implemented in the incentive design, or as a response to bugs that may be identified in our payments code.
• Management of external Salesforce technology provider – Support in managing relationship with external service provider to identify: what work gets outsourced vs. done in-house, define change request documents, oversee project management, help maintain timelines, and provide feedback on work completed.
• Project management for feature roll-out – Ensure that the necessary components of a roll-out are in place: communication to internal and external users ahead of the roll-out, documentation such as user and troubleshooting guides, support post-launch (check-ins, feedback requests), and monitoring (impact of feature roll-outs on organizational goals).
• Retroactive feature documentation and user support (internally and externally) – Develop and maintain user guides for the Aceli platform, especially for key modules.
• Feature development (alongside Aceli’s other Salesforce vendor) – Carry out targeted development or changes to the Salesforce platform that we jointly deem ideal for internal development, rather than external/outsourced development to our Salesforce partner, to accelerate the turnaround time from scoping to go-live.
• Salesforce admin / super-user support internally – Be the go-to technical resource within Aceli for user questions about or challenges with the platform.

• Demonstrated Salesforce code development experience (sample projects required). At least 3 years of experience working with Salesforce
• Minimum of 2 years of experience in product management: defining, prioritizing, and managing feature requirements
• Experience creating user guides and providing user support
• Experience with linking Salesforce data tables to data visualization platforms
• Adept problem-solver: able to convert team technology pain points into requirements and to propose solutions that consider all necessary factors
• Excellent project manager: able to develop realistic timelines with appropriate level of detail and clear understanding of tradeoffs / implications for various stakeholders; able to meet deadlines and effectively manage stakeholder expectations
• Go-getter: takes initiative / identifies problems and proposes solutions readily; owns their work from start to finish; requires minimal supervision
• Customer-centric: showcases an empathetic approach to user problem solving; enjoys making user experience better
• Professional with a demonstrated record of the highest integrity and ethical conduct, and
• Bachelor’s degree. Need not be in a technical field – on-the-job experience most important.

The Global Development Incubator is an Equal Opportunity Employer and considers all applicants based on merit without regard to race, sex, color, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, disability or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.

If you believe you can clearly demonstrate your abilities to meet the relevant criteria for the role, please submit your application quoting in the subject line the Job Title "Senior Associate - Salesforce & Product", and attach your detailed CV, cover letter stating your interest in and qualifications for the position, e-mail address and telephone contacts.

Applications that do not include a cover letter tailored to this position will not be considered. 

The application deadline is Friday, February 09, 2024. Applications will be considered on a rolling basis.