Danielle Laity, Product Manager in Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa
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Danielle Laity

Verified Expert  in Product Management

Product Manager

Location
Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa
Toptal Member Since
June 29, 2021

Danielle is a product strategist and manager with a proven track record of developing new solutions and taking them to market with a data-based approach across diverse markets internationally. Her experience in financial technology comes from a foundation in banking where I managed Open Innovation and Corporate Ventures for the biggest bank in Africa. She has built products across various financial services areas, including payments, forex, cryptocurrency, chatbots, crowdfunding, and investment.

Project Highlights

Shyft
Led the project from the first workshop through to selecting and managing partnerships to build an award winning product.
LayUp
I lead the product including the management of all UX/UI and Agile development.
Aurora Sustainability
Led Aurora from an idea into an international community with 58,000 users across four continents that helps international clients lower their carbon footprint.

Expertise

Work Experience

Go to Market and Product Strategy Lead

2018 - 2021
MIRIS
  • Took Aurora Sustainability from an idea to a sustainable community with 58,000 users across four continents that helps international clients to lower their carbon footprint.
  • Managed the go-to-market team including product design, product management, brand, and analytics.
  • Managed the MIRIS X project (a blockchain-based investment platform) from the first design thinking workshop through to launch and growth.

Innovation Lab Lead

2019 - 2019
Yoco Technologies Proprietary Limited
  • Validated and developed the strategy for a new card acceptance device.
  • Managed a custom merchant integration including pricing, development scoping and agile management, user experience design, and stakeholder relations.
  • Validated, designed, and built a new payments product through user research, collaborating with product design, and managing a mobile development team.

Head of Product

2018 - 2018
Lay Up
  • Set up and managed the product function including all developer and design processes.
  • Managed the development of the first version of the product.
  • Managed all user testing, design, and requirements for the first version of the product.

Product Management and Strategy

2017 - 2017
Luno
  • Developed the product roadmap to guide the strategy and feature implementation of the product.
  • Managed and mentored a junior product manager in agile processes, product strategy, and user experience testing.
  • Led and implemented regular conversion experiments that lead to more active users and trades as well as reporting dashboards for these experiments.

Open Innovation Manager

2013 - 2016
Standard Bank South Africa
  • Led the Shyft Project from ideation through development to launch. This included managing the partnerships with fintech companies to integrate and provide various functionality to the product as well as all internal bank stakeholder management.
  • Set up the Open Innovation Lab that allowed business units to develop solutions with external partners.
  • Managed and mentored junior product managers in design thinking, product development, and go to market.

Shyft

https://getshyft.co.za/

Led the project from the first workshop through to selecting and managing partnerships to build an award winning product.

Shyft is a foreign exchange wallet for the global citizen. It allows for international payments, live foreign exchange as well as physical and virtual cards. It was built through leveraging an open banking API from Standard Bank and partnerships with various financial services tech companies.

LayUp

https://layup.co.za/

I lead the product including the management of all UX/UI and Agile development.

LayUp is a digital layaway solution that allows users to create a payment plan for goods and services online or in-store. The platform manages everything from merchants, eCommerce integrations, and all customer-facing aspects, providing seamless sales and installments.

Aurora Sustainability

Led Aurora from an idea into an international community with 58,000 users across four continents that helps international clients lower their carbon footprint.

Aurora is a platform that allows people to calculate and improve their impact on the planet. This tool can also be used to measure the footprint of the people within a company or city and provides deep insights into the sustainable consumer.
2009 - 2012

Honours Degree in Business Science

University of Cape Town - Cape Town, South Africa

MAY 2015 - PRESENT

Design Thinking

Hasso Platner D School

OCTOBER 2014 - PRESENT

Corporate Venturing

Stanford University

Collaboration That Works

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