Senior Business Manager - Product & Commercial
Sporty Group is building a communications engine that keeps millions of customers across Africa and Latin America connected, verified and engaged. This role owns the product and commercial direction of the messaging stack, including bulk SMS, RCS, WhatsApp Business, voice and verification across 10+ live markets in a fast-moving iGaming environment.
Deliverability, speed and cost directly affect customer experience, conversion and operating expenditure. The Senior Business Manager sits at the intersection of Product, Engineering, partnerships and operations. The role involves selecting and managing aggregators and CPaaS providers, defining routing and failover requirements, and building the commercial discipline that turns messaging into a competitive advantage. If the economics of A2P messaging are understood and the impact of a failed OTP journey in a live market has been felt, this is the remit.
- Own the messaging and verification roadmap across markets, balancing reliability, customer experience, cost and speed to market.
- Translate the needs of CRM, Growth, Customer Operations and local market teams into clear product requirements and priorities.
- Define channel selection and fallback strategies for verification, transactional and promotional communications.
- Assess new channels and capabilities against market availability, permitted use cases and measurable business value.
- Partner with Engineering to deliver integrations, routing capabilities, monitoring and operational tooling.
- Own the selection, evaluation and ongoing performance of messaging aggregators, CPaaS providers and other relevant partners.
- Lead negotiations on pricing, volume commitments, service levels, payment terms and contractual protections, working with vendors and Legal.
- Build a clear view of messaging economics by market, channel, provider and use case.
- Reduce operating costs through better rates, routing, channel selection and supplier allocation while protecting delivery quality.
- Maintain supplier scorecards, run performance reviews and hold partners accountable for service failures and commercial commitments.
- Manage supplier concentration risk and ensure critical markets have credible alternatives.
- Own business outcomes for delivery success, latency and verification completion across the messaging stack.
- Define routing, retry and failover requirements with Engineering, including provider redundancy for critical customer journeys.
- Establish reporting that connects provider delivery data with customer outcomes, including completed verification.
- Lead provider escalations and coordinate incident response with Engineering and market teams when messaging performance deteriorates.
- Drive root-cause reviews and corrective actions for recurring failures.
- Plan capacity and supplier readiness for peak events, campaigns and new market launches.
- Own messaging spend forecasts and performance against budget, working with Finance and business stakeholders.
- Track cost per delivered message and cost per successful verification, alongside total spend and volume.
- Identify avoidable costs from unnecessary retries, duplicate messages, inefficient channel choices and suspicious traffic.
- Partner with Security and Fraud teams to detect and reduce OTP abuse and artificial traffic.
- Work with Legal, Compliance and local teams to ensure messaging activity meets applicable requirements and provider policies, including consent, sender registration and iGaming use restrictions.
- 8+ years in messaging, CPaaS, or communications, in a product, commercial, or hybrid role (required)
- Experience with A2P SMS, RCS Business Messaging, and WhatsApp Business, including pricing models, template/conversation, sender IDs, and DLT/registration (required)
- Experience in cost management, vendor negotiations, modelling per-message and per-conversion costs, and presenting data to senior leadership (required)
- Experience with Verification and CRM Products and the ability to translate operations/commercialisation into concise requirements that align with technical and product visions (required)
- Deep understanding of delivery, latency, and cost dashboards; ability to pull and interpret data to provide insight and support solutions (required)
- Experience operating across emerging markets within Africa, understanding local regulations and adapting to new landscapes (required)
- Experience collaborating cross-functionally to align with partners, internal teams, and executives (required)
- Background in highly regulated industries (nice-to-have)
- Hands-on experience and existing relationships with regional vendors within Africa (nice-to-have)
- Experience reading API docs, understanding webhooks, and integration constraints (nice-to-have)
- Experience with channels and tooling: email, push, in-app, USSD, chatbots/conversational AI, and CDP (nice-to-have)
- Experience standing up multi-vendor routing across providers (nice-to-have)
Sporty Group is a sports technology company whose brands include SportyBet, a mobile-first sportsbook licensed in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Zambia, Tanzania and Uganda, alongside the Sporty.com app and the SportyTV broadcast service in Nigeria. SportyBet has sponsorship partnerships with Real Madrid and Manchester City. The group hires across Europe, Latin America and Asia, and many of its technology and product roles are remote.