Melissa Malala

AI-native Product Manager based in Nairobi with 8 years of product experience and 10+ years building consumer and AI products across financial services, education, and consumer platforms in Africa. Most recently the first Product Owner for Automation & AI at Mogo Kenya (Eleving Group), where I owned production LLM voice agents in Swahili and English across debt collection, telesales and customer care — from a 629,000-call outbound platform to an inbound customer-care pilot, its vendor integration pack and the knowledge-base programme behind it. In parallel, advising Busara on the AgentBI programme for CGIAR Alliance, authoring product specifications grounded in behavioural research with East African users.

Prior consumer-product work includes Wowzi (influencer platform serving hundreds of thousands of African creators) and Games On The Go (mobile gaming x M-PESA). Use Claude, ChatGPT, Bolt, and Cursor daily for rapid prototyping, user-research synthesis, and prompt engineering. Born and raised in Kenya; built for African families and global standards.

Product Owner, Automation & AI (AI Product Manager) at Mogo Auto Ltd (Eleving Group) (2026-05 – 2026-10)

• Built the AI product function from zero. First dedicated AI product owner in a 600-person consumer lender: set the strategy, roadmap and weekly delivery cadence for AI voice and chat agents across debt collection (May-Jun), then telesales, inbound customer care and CX automation (Jun-Oct), reporting to the Head of CXE and presenting to Eleving Group leadership in Latvia.
• Owned a production LLM voice agent end to end. Chaseit orchestration, Soniox STT, Swahili/English prompt stack: 629,552 calls, 41,266 users, 46.4% connect rate, 25.7% promise-to-pay rate, KES 98.1M monthly PTP value. Ran the 30-day, 21-dimension analysis that surfaced a 68% misclassification failure mode; audited the production prompt against 26,000 calls and delivered a V4 rewrite (47% shorter, Swahili-first, 12 bilingual intent handlers) for A/B deployment.
• Led the inbound customer-care AI pilot with Exotel ("Zuri", voice and chat). Wrote the Phones knowledge base (34 resolution procedures) and inbound prompt the bot runs on, the tester guides for the customer-care team, and three UAT rounds (37 scenarios); compiled structured vendor feedback after each. Pilot moved from UAT to API integration during my tenure.
• Produced the vendor-safe integration pack that unblocked the API work. A 50-capability API readiness register with exposure levels ("we share the contract, not the credentials"), an Integration Specification, a synthetic Sample Payloads pack (12 personas, 42 samples, 11 error cases, no customer data) and a Bot Behaviour Specification (6 rules, 16 customer states, 16 transfer reason codes) — the documents a legacy-ERP business with no API owner needed to brief a vendor without exposing security details.
• Ran the telesales AI track and the Vehicles expansion. Analysed 21,671 Amina outbound calls; designed the prompt-rule test that gated the Speed Boda new-lead agent's launch at 10-20% of traffic; built the Vehicles discovery workbook (live page with shared database) and the Vehicles knowledge-base programme — a template nine agents filled with 81 scenarios in one week — and reviewed it into 22 conflicts and 12 management decisions with a figures register, so the bot would never quote a number the business had not confirmed.
• Set the programme's operating record. Four-workstream programme audit with tracker, status deck and dashboard (decisions for leadership, evidence gaps, sourced claims only); vendor RFI to five AI voice/chat vendors with a scorecard; DPA review and MSA position; ElevenLabs enterprise negotiation support; Verdant technical-assistance proposal; AI for surveys and consent calls scoped with Communications.
• Worked AI-natively. Claude (Cowork and Code) for analysis, specifications, interactive artefacts and document packs; SQL against call logs and ERP exports; Python for audit tooling. QA done by listening to real calls and chats, weekly, in Swahili.

AI Product Consultant at Busara Center for Behavioral Economics (AgentBI / CGIAR Alliance) (2026-03 – Present)

• Lead product strategist on AgentBI, a behaviourally informed AI platform for last-mile users (agricultural extension agents) across East Africa.
• Authored Chapter 2 (User Typologies and Career Journey Mapping) and Chapter 7 (Product Specification, Phase 1-3) of the AgentBI playbook.
• Ran the EMBE user research (n=207): K-Means clustering surfaced four behaviourally distinct user types (chi-square p<0.0001). Overturned the team default that users are sales-motivated (only 5.3% are); shifted MVP scope to typology-conditioned matching.
• Designed and facilitated the Naivasha workshop with field practitioners; turned quant research into a single MVP decision the room committed to.

Product Lead (Pro Bono) at Games On The Go (2025-01 – 2025-06)

• Owned product vision and roadmap for a mobile gaming app integrated into Safaricom M-PESA. Led design, engineering, and ops to delivery.
• Focused on revenue-first unit economics and user engagement loops; aligned technical build with user acquisition and partner commercials.

Product Manager, Data at Wowzi (2022-08 – 2024-10)

• Owned the data product line on a consumer platform serving hundreds of thousands of African creators; lifted campaign completion 25% and user acquisition 20% through agile delivery and behavioural analytics.
• Shipped a creator-and-advertiser mobile wallet integrated with Mastercard Foundation and Paystack on secure AWS services.
• Built a data governance framework that lifted enterprise compliance 30% in six months and adoption 25% within a quarter, unlocking Coca-Cola, Safaricom, and ABSA contracts.
• Wrote SQL queries and BigQuery pipelines for product analytics; instrumented A/B tests and behavioural telemetry across mobile and web.

Product Manager Lead, Artificial Intelligence at Technology Innovators Network Kenya (Think) (2021-09 – 2022-08)

• Led a multidisciplinary PM and engineering team delivering AI-driven civic governance and digital-identity products to public-sector clients (CLEAR Global, Kenya Private Sector Alliance, Business Registration Service).
• Defined product strategy and roadmap for digital identity at national scale; managed partner relations and the pan-African mobile-payments integration plan.

Product Manager (Consulting) at Qhala (2021-01 – 2021-08)

• Clients included Kytabu Inc. (Kenyan education-technology startup serving learners and schools), African Development Bank, Microsoft Philanthropies, Fairwork Foundation (University of Oxford), Kentegra Biotechnology Holdings.
• Co-authored Africa's Digital Skills Toolkit (4IR blueprint for AfDB and Microsoft Philanthropies); led primary research across eight African countries with founders, lecturers, and ministries.
• Ran service-design research, backlog refinement, wireframing, and sprint delivery with engineering, design, data, and research teams using Jira, Confluence, and Slack.

Analyst at Brave Venture Labs (2019-03 – 2020-11)

• Advised African startups (Partech Africa, One Acre Fund, KOKO Networks, AZA Finance, Medtronic Labs, World Food Programme, Carepay) on hiring strategy across five markets; built data libraries and ontologies through NLP analysis, hypothesis testing and feature engineering.

Operations Director at Sugarpie LLP (2016 – 2019)

Digital Marketing and Operations Intern at Hassle.com (2014 – 2014)

Managing Director at Kungara Kenya (2011 – 2016)

MSc in Management and Strategy – The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)

BSc (Hons) in International Business, Finance and Economics – The University of Manchester

Summer School in Innovation and Entrepreneurship – Imperial College London