The Solutions / Innovation Lead will play a pivotal role in leading, designing, scoping, and evaluating innovative, tech-enabled learning solutions and products for AMI’s client projects. Reporting to the Head of Innovation / Solutions, this role will act as a sector, product, and methodology expert, supporting client scoping processes and leading the technical and solution design stage of large-scale client projects through research, needs analysis, design, and development phases in an agile squad model. This individual will have strong experience in/ understanding of the African SME ecosystem and/or African skills development.
The Solutions Lead will represent AMI to clients as a senior technical expert during scoping, design, and evaluation stages, ensuring solutions align with AMI’s methodology and deliver measurable impact. They will also ensure projects are executed using best practices in agile project management, data analysis, and documentation, supporting Senior Programme Managers during the delivery phase and leading the evaluation and product transformation stages. While they will be supported by management and processes of SCRUM, they will play a lead role in ensuring a clean, well-documented backlog (supporting detailed scoping across projects), clearly defined sprints that drive successful implementation and client delivery (during key design stages including scoping, research/needs analysis, design, and development stages), and advocating for resources from key cross-functional units to support a fully functioning squad model.
Key Responsibilities
Scoping and Designing Innovative Solutions
- Act as a sector, product, and methodology expert to support the Partnerships team in scoping client projects.
- Collaborate with clients to conduct research, needs analysis, and solution design, ensuring alignment with their goals and AMI’s learning methodology. Ensuring high quality deliverables aligned to scope and defining / defending core value proposition
- Represent AMI in client meetings as the technical solutions / project lead during the scoping, design, and development phases.
- Develop core project documentation, including diagnostics, user personas, and initial project roadmaps that support high quality, standardised innovations / solutions for key SME segments.
Client Leadership and Representation
- Serve as the senior technical representative to clients during key stages of project design and development.
- Maintain a strong client presence throughout delivery, ensuring alignment between client expectations and project execution.
- Participate in high-level client meetings, presenting progress and adapting strategies as needed.
Leading the technical design stage of large-complex innovation projects
- Lead the overall scope and technical design of learning and capacity-building solutions by leveraging AMI’s existing methodologies, products, and diagnostic approaches to craft overarching solutions. Manage and lead a squad of product and learning experts to deliver detailed, scalable solutions.
- Define the overall scope of learning and capacity-building solutions by analyzing client needs and leveraging AMI’s existing methodologies, products, and diagnostic tools to create impactful and scalable solutions.
- Craft overarching technical designs for learning and capacity-building programs, ensuring alignment with AMI’s strategic goals, learning frameworks, and client objectives.
- Adapt and integrate AMI’s products and approaches into customized solutions for different client contexts, sectors, and program objectives, maintaining consistency in quality and methodology.
- Lead a cross-functional squad of product and learning experts in translating the overarching solution design into detailed, actionable program components, tools, and resources.
- Oversee the development and delivery of scalable solutions, ensuring they meet client expectations, align with AMI’s learning impact goals, and adhere to timelines and budgets.
- Collaborate with the Solutions Ops / Project Manager to ensure agile project principles are deployed in the design and development phases, ensuring core documentation, metrics, and processes are in place and a collaborative squad model is operationalized to deploy expertise from cross-functional teams efficiently to deliver new products/innovations
- Track progress and resolve blockers during sprints, maintaining clear communication with cross-functional teams.
- Ensure that all project components align with AMI’s quality standards and methodologies..
Managing and Evaluating Success
- Lead project / product evaluations and transformation using data to measure success against defined metrics and outcomes.
- Collaborate with the Impact Intelligence team to gather and analyze impact data, making recommendations for improvements or further development.
- Support the Senior Programme Manager in tracking project progress, ensuring adherence to timelines, and addressing challenges during the delivery phase.
- Take a leading role during the evaluation and close-out phases, delivering high-quality reports and insights to clients and internal stakeholders.
- Prepare, where appropriate, product briefs, initial market research and business case / product model for innovations to be considered by the Product team.