Venture Success Manager
Nairobi/ Lagos
Founders Factory Africa – Venture Build /
Full-time /
Hybrid
The Venture Success Manager (VSM) is obsessed with adding value to ventures and supporting them to achieve Product Market Fit faster. As the day-to-day liaison for founders, they build strong relationships with them and are a champion for the business both internally and externally to drive their success. Driving success means managing the delivery of a venture’s strategy, ensuring momentum, and facilitating a positive experience for founders. This directly links to FFA’s vision of being the best partner for early-stage entrepreneurs in Africa.
Together with the Venture Partner, who is accountable for the success of our ventures, VSMs are assigned to businesses that are going through the FFA investment process. They work closely with the Venture Partner to set goals with founders, assess a business's progress along the FFA Traction Framework, and analyse risks across all businesses to prioritise interventions. While Venture Partners set the strategy for each business, Venture Success Managers are responsible for its execution. They have a deep understanding of FFA’s Traction Framework and collaborate closely with the studio team who are responsible for the work. VSMs work with the team to create alignment, provide a POV on what needs to be done, hold the team and founders accountable, reduce friction, and reinforce the top priorities and milestones. They also establish best practice behaviours with the team and founders to facilitate collaboration, effective tracking and feedback loops.
Venture Success Managers radiate information across the organisation inputting into internal and external reporting functions. They support both portfolio and impact teams with the information they need to achieve their goals.
Responsibilities include:
Executing on the strategic direction of a business including organising the internal team and the venture towards measurable outcomes. This includes:
- Working with the team and founders to establish and drive key metrics that benchmark as-is and that can be used to track progress.
- Facilitating monthly planning meetings with founders and Studio to ensure alignment on priorities and a path towards key outcomes. Attending board meetings to provide any context necessary and to get input from the founders and VP that might clarify areas of execution and strategy.
- Supporting founder and team participation through effective governance.
- Consistently radiating information about the start-up’s progress and challenges to the Venture Partner and internal teams, as well as coaching the founders on doing the same. Proactively taking on tasks and doing some of the work to take us closer to our goals.
Driving continuous improvements to our team processes, collaborating closely with our studio, sourcing and portfolio teams. This includes imparting new ways of work and best practice in terms of collaboration and reporting.
Ensuring a market-leading founder experience through collating and addressing founder feedback, and coordinating our team of experts to achieve the set goals.
Tracking and reporting on business progress and key metrics for internal and external stakeholders.
Building relationships and networks that create value for our portfolio companies. Empowering founders to find the resources they need to solve their challenges.
Requirements:
- Previous experience in managing multifunctional teams
- Has held a management-level position or equivalent
- Experience in project, programme or product management or in a start-up, accelerator or VC firm
- Demonstrated experience in developing success metrics, monitoring progress, and successfully delivering on project objectives, KPIs, etc.
- Deep understanding and engagement with the venture and startup ecosystem, either as a founder, employee, or mentor
- Execution-focused, details oriented, takes ownership, and loves solving problems
- Passion for technology and supporting entrepreneurs in their journey
- Highly self-directed with an ability to get a lot done with sometimes limited direction
