Job Description

Mid-Level Digital Product Manager — UCOOK

You will be the person who knows how UCOOK actually works — the website, the payments, the billing, the logistics, the systems that get the right ingredients into the right box — and who turns that knowledge into what we build next.

UCOOK is a tech start-up, meal-kit delivery service, delivering across South Africa. Our network of top chefs create recipes for our customers to choose from each week, and we deliver the fresh, locally sourced ingredients to their door. Whilst meal-kit is our core we also have a significant add-on business comprising of frozen meals, pizza, wine and a broad market offering.

We are part of the Silvertreebrands group of leading brands, and you will work closely with colleagues across our brands. Silvertreebrands builds disruptive purpose-driven consumer and digital brands, focusing on amazing customer experiences that are "good for you, good for the planet." We trust our employees with full accountability and autonomy from day one. This unique entrepreneurial and performance-driven culture enables us to achieve executional excellence.

About the role

This role manages UCOOK's internal digital systems — not the operational functions they serve, but the platforms themselves. You become the go-to expert on how the website, payments, logistics, billing and recipe/pick-and-pack systems work, and you turn that expertise into a product roadmap: identifying opportunities, scoping improvements, and prioritising what gets built next.

You work at the intersection of the business' priorities, the UCOOK tech team, the marketing team, and most importantly, our customers. That includes scoping upcoming tickets, projects and priorities, designing new and improved customer experiences, and understanding customer behaviour from digital analytics tools, recordings and customer interviews. Delivering on tickets is the responsibility of the UCOOK tech team, but you work closely with them to jointly ensure quality and testing of new builds, and to manage sprint processes.

The ideal candidate has solid product ownership experience, but is still fairly new in their product career. You can expect to work closely with product colleagues on our other brands, a group-wide Head of Product.

Critical to the future of our product team — and the broader organisation — is using AI to improve the quality and efficiency of everything we do. You will work with AI tools to capture the decisions and justifications behind what we do, along with standard playbooks, and then collaborate with colleagues to expose that context to AI agents supporting our teams.

Roles and responsibilities

Roadmap and prioritisation

• Prepare product-driven initiatives, present identified opportunities to key stakeholders, and formulate the product roadmap
• Prioritise work with the Head of Product and business leaders
• Manage multiple projects and components simultaneously

Delivery and process

• Create, manage and follow up on software development tickets
• Administer and lead sprint rhythms
• Own testing and quality assurance: prepare and manage test plans for all deployments
• Work with other departments to approve deployments and train business users
• Draft and collate delivery reporting (time logging, sprint velocity and similar)

Systems expertise

• Become and remain the expert on the systems in your area, supporting other departments with queries and problems
• Manage day-to-day communication between the business and the tech team
• Identify process efficiencies and product opportunities from a well-founded base of systems knowledge
• Build and improve AI processes and agents to lift efficiency across the organisation, and make our documentation come to life

Customer experience

• Evaluate weaknesses and opportunities in the customer experience and in operational efficiency, and turn them into development work
• Generate and develop ideas for features that surprise and delight our customers, and work with the tech team to bring them to life
• Research market trends and opportunities using data and analytics

Requirements

Qualification and experience

• A relevant degree or diploma, or equivalent. Strong hands-on product experience is acceptable in place of a formal qualification.
• 2+ years of hands-on digital product ownership or product management in an agile environment
• Solid understanding of agile methodologies and common tools (JIRA, Asana, Notion or similar)

Must have

• Strong prioritisation and roadmap-scoping skills — able to say no as well as yes
• A structured, methodical approach: you document decisions and go and find out rather than assuming
• The appetite to build deep expertise in unfamiliar systems fast, and to hold it as a source of authority others rely on
• Able to explain a technical trade-off to an ops manager and a business constraint to a developer, and get a decision out of both
• Self-disciplined, able to self-manage and set goals across several concurrent domains
• Genuine interest in what we sell — you'd want to fix the ordering experience because you care how the box turns up

Advantageous

• Experience in business analysis and/or quality assurance
• Experience in ecommerce, or in subscription and logistics-heavy environments
• Experience with core web technologies (e.g. HTML), or with payments or logistics systems specifically
• Experience using AI to solve business problems or improve efficiency and productivity
• A track record of doing more than the job asked for — a side project, a distinction, something you drove that nobody assigned you

Our tools and systems

• Our Silvertreebrands values are Purpose, Entrepreneurship, Ownership and Honesty

• Website and delivery: Node.js, React.js, PostgreSQL, JIRA, GitLab for git and CI/CD, Acumatica
• Analytics: GA4, session recording and heatmap tools, BigQuery
• Team collaboration: Notion, Slack, Claude Cowork, Figma

Our culture and team

• Our Silvertreebrands values are Purpose, Entrepreneurship, Ownership and Honesty
• We are close-knit and encouraging
• We are self-motivated and strive to see projects through to completion
• We innovate as we grow
• We encourage teamwork and participation
• We have created a relaxed but professional working environment
• We respect all people and cultures
• We believe in keeping our team happy so that the work we produce is of the highest quality

Location

The UCOOK team is based in Cape Town and this role is hybrid. The tech team is substantially remote. Preference will be given to Cape Town-based candidates, but we will review applications from candidates based elsewhere.