Head of Innovations

Job Summary  

As a start-up social enterprise, we’re doing something never done before in this market and are looking for a Head of Innovations to push our team’s boundaries on experimentation and achieving product-market-fit across multiple regions and product lines. 

You’ll be the champion of innovation and experimentation at Cycle Connect and ultimately lead our team on initiatives that drive the future of the company. 

Ugandan nationals are strongly encouraged to apply.

Your Responsibilities

Your team is tasked with achieving product-market-fit in all areas of current operation and to establish how to achieve this in future areas of operation. With millions of farmers financially excluded, we see the need to not only serve a portion of this market gap, but wholly disrupt the market in a sustainable way, which to us means achieving product-market-fit across all offerings and the company as a whole. 

Therefore your responsibilities include ensuring: 

1. That experimentation happens. 

And that it happens across the entire organization. This will involve cultivating curiosity throughout our entire team, including creating a culture where team members value surprises and see failures not as mistakes, but as opportunities for learning. 

This will additionally involve systematizing the experimentation to include all team members in the company and to track and manage all of the data and results. 

2. That experimentation happens well and is useful to the company. 

Meaning, it must: 

1. Be robust, reliable, and maintain a high quality process with high quality data.
2. Be unbiased. 
3. Have key findings that rise to the top and are communicated throughout the company, becoming institutional knowledge for all to see. 
4. Be conducted with high integrity and very ethically sensitive. We are not about experimentation at all costs, but rather meaningful experimentation that takes into account our client’s situation and perspective.

3. That innovation happens with ever increasing speed and frequency. 

We need you to drive it to be: cost-effective, efficient, and gain validation per each time period. 

This translates to a large number of small pilots that are continuously iterated on, over a smaller number of bigger pilots. We value quantity in experimentation and it is your responsibility to drive this throughout the company. 

4. That all of this experimentation adds up and pushes Cycle to become a more sustainable impactful business with increased profits and a strong competitive advantage. 

To make this happen, you’ll contribute to setting and managing Cycle's objectives and key results (OKRs) to ensure that they align with the innovations agenda. You’ll additionally own and communicate widely an ever-updated business model canvas and a prioritize assumption list. 

All throughout the process you’ll ensure that the experimentation meaningfully moves the needle. We want market disruption with impact, which means we are not looking for incremental change, but truly meaningful ones. 

In order to do this, we expect you to continuously learn and bring in the most relevant subject matter expertise for the benefit of the company. 

Who are we looking for: 

These are our must-have skills and requirements. 

• Research: you have served as the lead investigator and are experienced with both quantitative and qualitative research. 
• Start-up experience: you have contributed meaningfully to start-up’s success, including either being an early on employee of a new venture or acting as an intrapreneur for a new initiative within a company. You have a strong business acumen. 
• Field experience: You have lived and worked upcountry before, including several years outside of Kampala. 
• Team and project management: you have a track record of facilitating and coaching to achieve results. 
• Systems builder: you are able to build systems from scratch and understand how processes and data flows between departments and teams. You’re acutely aware of how information needs to flow across different teams and can connect the dots to build the streamlined system yourself. 
• Ugandan team leadership: you have successfully supported and influenced a Ugandan team to adopt an innovation culture and processes. 
• Innovation techniques: You have a strong practical (and theoretical) understanding of prototyping, lean and other innovation techniques. You have demonstrated results with them. 
• Cycle Connect values: you uphold our core values of humility, accessibility, and integrity. 

Do NOT apply if: 

• You have no research experience. 
• You only have a traditional corporate background. You must have worked for at least one start-up and we will not consider candidates who only have experience with larger entities where they did not serve to create a new market or product. 
• You only worked in a very small entity that has no, or very little, structure with less than 5 staff. 
• You have not previously led a team and collaborated projects across different departments.

Other Information 

Work location will be in Gulu, with frequent travel to our branch in Lira. Compensation is commensurate with experience. Additional benefits include health insurance, and professional development. We will agree on a 6-month trial period with learning and performance objectives after which we offer a two year contract. 

Ugandan nationals are strongly encouraged to apply.