Head of Product - Wadhwani AI

About the Company

Wadhwani AI Global (WAIG) is a non-profit AI research and product organisation building AI for social impact across the Global South, outside India. We work with governments, multilateral institutions, foundations, and on-the-ground partners to deploy AI solutions in agriculture, health, and education at population scale. With deepening operations in Rwanda, Kenya, Ethiopia, and across the African continent, we are entering a new phase of growth — building product capability that matches the scale and ambition of our partnerships.

Requirements

Role Overview

The Head of Product will lead products across the organisation. This is a senior leadership role responsible for the AI products WAIG builds, deploys, and scales across health, education, agriculture, and other social impact verticals. This role owns the product function end-to-end and partners closely with leadership on strategy, delivery, and donor engagement.

Your Role

1. Product Strategy & Vision

• Define the product vision, roadmap, and priorities across health, education, and agriculture verticals
• Translate WAIG's mission and donor commitments into a coherent multi-year product strategy
• Make build-vs-partner-vs-consume decisions for AI capabilities across the portfolio
• Drive product positioning in donor conversations, government engagements, and partner discussions

2. Delivery & Execution

• Own end-to-end delivery of AI products from concept through deployment and scale
• Set and enforce product standards: discovery rigour, technical specs, evaluation criteria, deployment quality
• Run a disciplined product lifecycle: hypothesis → MVP → field evaluation → iteration → scale
• Ensure timely, high-quality delivery against grant commitments and donor milestones

3. Team Leadership

• Build and lead the product organisation — recruit, mentor, and grow product talent across geographies
• Foster a strong product culture: user-obsessed, evidence-driven, technically rigorous

• Partner closely with the Technology team on engineering capacity, infrastructure, and ML delivery

4. External Engagement

• Represent WAIG's product capability in conversations with governments (Ministry of ICT Rwanda, Smart Africa, ministries of health and education across Africa), multilateral institutions (UNICEF, UNDP, World Bank), and donors (Gates Foundation, others)
• Lead product portions of major proposals and donor pitches; contribute to fundraising in partnership with the Growth lead
• Build relationships with peer organisations, research labs, and AI-for-good ecosystems

5. Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Partner with senior leadership on overall organisational strategy and delivery commitments
• Work with the Growth and Fundraising lead on pipeline shaping and proposal development
• Support the broader leadership team in operationalising the WAIG strategy

What We Are Looking For

Experience

• 15+ years of experience in AI product management
• Track record of building and shipping AI/ML products at scale — in real-world deployment
• contexts, not pure consumer or pure research
• Direct experience working with governments on technology deployments
• Experience working with or in Africa, the Global South, or comparable contexts strongly preferred

Capability

• Strong technical depth — able to engage credibly with ML engineers, evaluate technical trade-offs, and shape solution architecture
• Outstanding strategic and structured thinking — able to set priorities, kill the wrong projects, and drive focus
• Excellent communicator — equally comfortable in a Minister's office, a donor pitch, a field site, and a code review
• Strong people leader — has built and grown product teams in distributed, multi-geography settings

Disposition

• Mission-aligned — genuinely motivated by AI for social impact, not just by the title or the geography
• Comfortable with ambiguity, frequent travel, and the realities of working in emerging-market deployment contexts
• High ownership; low ego; bias to action