Product Specialist

ABOUT DISCOVERY AND VITALITY

Discovery is a shared value insurance company whose purpose and ambition are achieved through a pioneering business model that incentivises people to be healthier and enhances and protects their lives.
Vitality supports Discovery's fundamental mission and shared-value model by assisting members in living, driving, and banking well. The Vitality environment is fast-paced and constantly evolving. Vitality keeps on the cutting edge of innovation by launching intriguing new products annually. Within the team of 500+ creative minds, initiatives span all areas of marketing, finance, data, people, MIS and actuarial, operations, strategic programs, and wellness, giving personnel sufficient opportunity to understand the business. Vitality collaborates with a diverse group of partners who support our mission and accept nothing less than an exceptional experience and level of service for our members. Vitality employees take delight in embodying the Discovery principles and the organization's primary mission of "getting people healthier and enhancing and protecting their lives" in all that they do.

ABOUT VITALITY STRATEGIC PROGRAMMES

The Vitality Strategic Programmes team is a high-performing, fast-paced team tasked with innovating, implementing, and managing the Vitality benefits, Vitality engagement, customer experience, thereby ensuring that Vitality meets its objectives which include:
Leveraging our strategic partnerships which are essential to ensure the effectiveness of the Vitality
programme for members as well as allowing Discovery Vitality to function optimally as a business.

Role Title
Product specialist

Role Grade
Specialist / Manager

Key Outputs

The successful applicant will be responsible for but not limited to the following job functions:

Be involved in executing the Vitality strategy in particular and Discovery strategy as a whole by introducing and enhancing various products and features in line with said strategy

Be product lead of cross functional development teams for new products or features, including large projects and launch items

Be able to successfully take a new product or feature from conceptualization through to implementation.

Be aware of customer experience, digital and gamification trends and innovations in this field to act as an expert in guiding Vitality’s new product or feature experience and enhancing Vitality’s current product or feature suite to achieve strategic outcomes

Maintain awareness of trends and innovations in health and wellness

Work with various stakeholders including marketing, systems, graphics and usability experts to ensure great member experience in new and current product enhancements

Manage the priority of work and ensure delivery of work within each product’s stream as well as where it fits in with the bigger picture of Vitality’s strategic outcomes according to greatest ROI and value.

Ensure all products are designed to optimize self-servicing and are operationally efficient

Hold strategic relationships with certain Vitality partners and suppliers.

Ensure the system’s solution is efficient in achieving ROI and prudent from a cost and time perspective

Develop a broad knowledge of Vitality’s product and feature offering and assess the impact of new products/feature and product/feature enhancements to the greater Vitality business.

Identify critical elements of each product that must contribute to the product’s success in particular and Vitality’s strategic success as a whole

Identify key failure points in products and ensure that appropriate mitigations are in place either in product design or efficient operational processes

Contribute to formal and informal research to assist in product design and refinement

Develop presentation decks for meetings both internal and external

Develop product/feature specifications for product/feature launches and enhancements as well as medium to large projects

Provide insights on the performance of products against strategic objectives, targets and expected outcomes and propose interventions where required to ensure that these are met.

Encouraging members to remain engaged with Vitality and realize the value in participating in Vitality Benefits.

Ensuring the Vitality Benefits achieve Vitality’s strategic objectives.

Ensure that every Vitality member has the opportunity to engage with Vitality and experience its value. This spans across each touch point in their journey from onboarding onwards, where we have the ability to continuously drive engagement.

Identifying barriers to engagement and remove hurdles for members.

Ensuring the member involves a simple journey that ends up rewarding members for what they do daily to take care of their health and a journey that makes members want to do more for themselves.

Responsibilities

The successful candidate will assume overall responsibility for:

Liaising with other areas of the business such as marketing and systems on an ongoing basis.

Compile business cases to motivate for the implementation of a new or enhancement to existing product/feature

Present information to an audience to gain buy-in and approval for a project or feature

Approve business specifications and system’ user specifications

Approve marketing content and UX / member journeys that they are in line with the strategic outcomes of the product

Approve testing plans to ensure all scenarios are catered for when new features and products are introduced.

Ensure operational efficiency is built into new and existing products.

Liaise and manage other business leads from other departments such as marketing, systems, operations, servicing, project office and finance to ensure their specifications fulfill the strategic and functional objectives of the products as well as implementation of the project is successful.

Contribute to formal and informal research to aid in the design and improvement of engagement, growth, customer experience, products, and features.

Ensure the relevant benefits have engagement targets defined

Be responsible for driving member engagement to ensure the stated targets are achieved. This involves creating engagement strategies and coordinating with relevant business areas to execute on these strategies.

Support the head of Vitality Product management to:

Plan and drive the delivery of new Vitality products/feature and existing product/feature enhancements.

Define and execute the Vitality strategy and ensuring projects further the business strategic objectives.

Perform other functionally related duties as assigned.

Maintain operational processes where strategic input determines the direction of product developments

Qualifications and experience

Minimum of a bachelors degree.

Post graduate degree or business diploma is preferable but not essential

3 - 5 years’ experience in product development / management and/or digital marketing and strategy.

Experience at managerial level is preferred

Exposure to digital trends and strategies

Experience in agile product ownership is preferred.

Proven track record of leading projects and people.

Proven track record of project implementation

Relationship building experience


Track record of working well across various departments in a large organization is preferable

A proven understanding of digital trends, customer experience, growth and engagement activities, and strategy formulation.

Key personality traits and competencies
Personality traits and culture fit:

Resilience and persistence

Optimism and creativity

Self-confidence to thrive in dynamic, changing and fast-paced environment.

Strong leadership ability

Self-motivated and driver of initiatives, with a strong sense of ownership

Excellent and well-structured written and verbal communication

Well organized

Eye for detail and big picture simultaneously

Able to context switch effectively, and to juggle multiple hats and multiple initiatives concurrently

Competencies:

INNOVATION

Creative Problem Solving ability

Creative thinker who can generate innovative ideas and turn these into implementable products and processes

Is able to define new product requirements holistically using systems and design thinking

Demonstrates an understanding of how one issue may be a part of a much larger system

ANALYSIS

Analyze data and other sources of information and break the information down into components, patterns and relationships

Makes rational judgments from the available information and analysis

Produces a range of solutions to problems

Produces new ideas, approaches and insights

Extract principles from broad sets of requirements

TEAM WORK

Expresses opinion and key points of information clearly

Adapts to team, works well in a team environment, and can work effectively with different personalities and different working styles

Gains clear agreement and commitment from others by persuading, convincing and negotiating

Has the ability to manage assigned personnel by providing orientation, guidance, assistance and developmental training, if organizational structure requires this

Consistent positive and transparent engagement with key stakeholders

Manage teams to ensure teams work together

EMPLOYMENT EQUITY   
                             
The Company’s approved Employment Equity Plan and Targets will be considered as part of the recruitment process. As an Equal Opportunities employer, we actively encourage and welcome people with various disabilities to apply.