Kenya

Generalist Product Management

Technical Product Management

Bachelor of Business Information Technology

Charles Kithika

Technology Consultant & AI Platform Architect

Leadership

AI/ML

Product roadmap

Product strategy

Stakeholder management

Balsamiq

Introduce yourself, define mentoring expectations and goals. Learn and grow together.

General mentorship

Making remote and globally distributed teams work for you and your needs.

Working remotely

Learn essential burnout prevention techniques and replenish physical and emotional energy.

Managing burnout

Talk to people who have learned to manage their imposter syndrome.

Dealing with imposter syndrome

Understanding factors that lead to a motivated team - recognition, communication and more.

Keeping team members motivated

Understand the process of training, motivating and directing your team members.

Managing people

Steps to building and maintaining a strong, cohesive and effective team.

Building an effective team

Learn the tips to successfully manage a team in a remote environment.

Managing a remote team

Tips for transitioning into a new role or company.

Changing roles

Learn the career path and progression for product managers.

Product management career path

Get actionable feedback on your resume or portfolio.

Resume and portfolio review

Practice HR, technical and behavioural interviews with mentors.

Practice mock interviews

How to set up the team for success by defining and measuring team's performance.

Choosing metrics and team goals

How to define and execute a successful launch and managing stakeholders expectations. (eg. MVP)

Launching new products or features

Identify and define potential product problems and generating possible solutions.

Identifying problems vs solutions

Learn how to properly present your work and share ideas and opinions.

Presenting your work with impact

Navigating the working relationship with PM's and engineers as a designer.

Working with product and engineering

How to set up product analytics and metrics to track success?

Leveraging Product Analytics

Ways to provide constructive feedback to team members.

Giving effective feedback

How to define an ambitious product vision and how to best communicate it to stakeholders?

Creating a product vision

Tips on how to work and collaborate with engineers and developers.

Working with engineers

Designing and building a custom AI-powered platform for ESP that digitizes their proprietary business diagnostic and growth methodologies, serving portfolio companies across Africa.

ESP's team had been applying these methodologies manually for years - conducting structured interviews, scoring assessments by hand, and building growth roadmaps in spreadsheets. The challenge was not just efficiency; it was consistency and scale. Different analysts produced different quality outputs, and the team could only handle a limited number of companies at a time.

I architected and built a platform where AI is embedded into every stage of the assessment workflow. The system generates context-aware questions based on a company's sector, maturity stage, and business model. AI produces initial scoring suggestions with confidence levels, which analysts then review, adjust, and approve. Multi-round review workflows ensure quality. A complete audit trail tracks every decision.

Conducting a comprehensive technical audit and leading data warehousing strategy for East Africa's leading fashion retailer (~28 stores across 3 countries).

The engagement began with a full-stack technical audit of Vivo's existing technology infrastructure, including their Odoo ERP implementation, e-commerce platform (Shopify Plus), and supporting systems. This identified critical gaps, redundancies, and hidden costs across the technology stack.

From the audit findings, I designed and am implementing a data warehousing strategy that aggregates information from 8+ previously disconnected systems - Shopify Plus, QuickBooks, Google Analytics, Meta advertising, FootfallCam (footfall analytics), and HR systems - into a unified data warehouse. The goal: give every department access to consistent, real-time data instead of manually assembled spreadsheet reports.

Toptal is an exclusive network of the top 3% freelance software developers, designers, marketing experts, management consultants, product managers, and project managers in the world. 

I collaborate with early-stage startups and scaling ventures to transform visionary ideas into market-ready products. Specializing in rapid validation and MVP development, I guide teams through the intricacies of product discovery, user-centric design, iterative prototyping and use of AI in product development and process workflows.

With a foundation in software engineering and agile methodologies, I support organizations in establishing robust product management frameworks that foster seamless collaboration between product and engineering teams. My approach ensures that product strategies are not only innovative but also executable, aligning closely with business objectives and user needs.

I joined Microsoft's App Platform team in Microsoft Entra, where I primary worked on security posture and incident detection based on poor app configuration for 1st party and 3rd party customer applications. A key project I worked on was detection and alerting of overprivileged applications consuming Microsoft Graph API and Azure Active Directory Graph API and related security incident resolutions.

I then transitioned to Microsoft Entra Domain Services, which was previously run and managed in Redmond and was transferred to Africa Development Centre, Nairobi. I led product planning and strategy, customer engagement, customer support and security enhancement features to improve security posture of the product.

Longhorn Publishers PLC is a Pan-African publishing house that is publicly listed in the Nairobi Securities Exchange. At Longhorn Publishers PLC, I led the technology team in the digital publishing department that was comprised of engineering, product management, design and content personnel who developed and managed a portfolio EdTech products. My main responsibility was defining and implementing the digital strategy of the digital publishing business unit, ideating and scaling product roadmaps and identifying strategic partnerships to help scale the technology business. I was also tasked with identifying ways in which the organisation can leverage new and existing technology products to improve operational efficiency and delivery across the organisation.

Kwara is a Nairobi and Berlin based startup offering cooperative financial institutions (e.g. SACCOs) a digital platform so that they can deliver modern online and mobile banking experiences to their members. I was responsible for product roadmap development and execution of Kwara's core banking SaaS platform, including conducting market research and prioritisation of the beta product.

Andela extends engineering teams with the most talented software developers in Africa. We recruit the most talented technologists on the African continent, shape them into technical leaders, and place them as full-time distributed team members with companies that range from Microsoft and IBM to dozens of high-growth startups. Backed by Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, GV (Google Ventures) and Spark Capital, Andela is building the next generation of global technology leaders.

I was responsible for the Andela technology platform team, delivering core architecture as a service for other products teams at Andela.

Responsible for the creation of localized business products for 8 markets across the continent with focus on revenue and leads. The role is positioned as the key liaison between business leaders with engineering and marketing teams. I was also responsible for researching global and local trends in the online cars space and using this information to design and roll out a Cars Classifieds Roadmap that is in line with group strategy.

Responsible for managing and advising on the system architecture of legacy platform while managing the technical outputs of the platform's software engineers. During the platform rebuild, I worked as the key liaison between the businesses and the engineering teams, responsible for translating business requirements to detailed specifications to be developed by a team of software engineers. This included managing and prioritizing bugs, wire framing and coding as necessary.

Joined the iHub as lead developer where my main responsibility was developing backend architecture and setting up server infrastructure of the iHub website. Other duties included developing customized in-house tools and reporting modules that were in-line with iHub’s internal processes. Worked with the lead designer to integrate a responsive HTML design into the core framework.

In charge of the Technical Division of Ringier Kenya Ltd, a subsidiary of a Swiss media and publishing company (Ringier International). Tasks include architecture design and implementation of Rupu (a daily deals e-commerce platform) and Pigiame (an online classifieds site that operated in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Rwanda).

Joined the Tangaza Money Transfer (a mobile money transfer product) software development team where my main role was to integrate front-end products to the payment gateway API and managing database redundancy for the core database.

Charles Kithika🇰🇪