Product Manager, Cards and APMs

Tokyo
Remote OK - Anywhere in Japan
Full-time
July 8, 2021

We accept, manage and settle money between countries, currencies and various local payment methods. Many companies, from small merchants up to global corporate giants, expect KOMOJU to work reliably, quickly, safely and without effort on a large scale. We handle many, many millions of transactions each year. Japan and Korea are our main theatres of operations now and we plan to expand into Europe later this year, followed by South East Asia and South America shortly.

The Tokyo team is responsible for building the payments products & infrastructure needed to launch new markets and process payments successfully around the world. The role is focused on improving our payment APIs for card acquiring and alternative payment methods (APMs).

At Degica, we consider every major component of our product to be a product of its own. The product manager leads, owns and manages this product as if it’s a business on its own. KOMOJU products are constantly evolving, improving and expanding, so an agile and open mindset is key.

You will:

Build and improve our payment products, with a focus on acquiring and alternative payments.
Strongly interact with areas of the business such as compliance, onboarding, financial institutions and regulatory aspects.
Be working directly with our customers to understand their needs and translating them into products
Interpret and understand various metrics and make product decisions based on them.

Requirements

3-4 years of experience in a product role
Experience with payments-related products or with technical platform
Built products by collaborating across engineering, analytics, marketing, design and other key stakeholders
Approached product management from a user’s vantage point and is motivated by the chance to improve the lives of customers
Strong written and verbal communication skills with a precise talent for articulating customer challenges
Experience managing technical software products from kick-off to ship
A whatever-it-takes approach to ensure that your product and team are successful
The ability to turn incomplete, conflicting, or ambiguous inputs into solid action plans
Not only shipped new products, but is obsessed about continuous product improvement and can optimize for shipping a portfolio of small, medium and large releases
Started or ran a business before.

You may be a fit if:

You’re a creative product thinker who loves collaborating across the company with engineering, risk operations, analytics, marketing, design and sale
You are eager to roll up your sleeves and build out a new product idea with a fast-moving motivated team
You have experience managing technical software products and navigating difficult technical tradeoffs
You do whatever it takes to make your product and team successful whether that means writing a QA plan or hunting down the root cause of a user’s frustration
You can turn incomplete, conflicting, or ambiguous inputs into solid action plans
Beyond just shipping new products, you obsess about continuous product improvement and can optimize for shipping a portfolio of small, medium and large releases
You have experience building or working on technical platforms that enable concurrent development of features by teams located around the world

Benefits

All national holidays observed
One week of summer vacation in addition to regular vacation
Opportunities to travel to developer and partner conferences
Motorized sitting / standing desks

APPLY NOW ➜

Product

About Degica

Degica supports companies that want to do business in Japan and Korea.

They run a payment platform called KOMOJU that serves a wide variety of companies from small to large, and they provide various services for clients that want to break into the Japanese market. They also have extensive expertise in gaming and eCommerce so they’re able to act as a bridge to the Japanese and Korean markets in these areas.

With partners like Valve and Shopify, Degica is a powerful ally for any company that wants to start or expand a business in the Japanese and Korean markets.

When it comes to engineering, Degica believes in having a flat, inclusive culture and constantly improving by continuing to evaluate itself. The company also prizes individuality and believes that each member brings their own unique value to the team. Their development processes are always updating as the company grows, and they have an engineering culture that largely organizes itself and each engineer has a lot of ownership in their own projects. This culture allows engineers to showcase their strengths while continuing to grow.

Japanese Language Policy
With around half of their total members (and around 75% of engineers) coming from outside Japan, Degica generally uses English for written communication (e.g. Slack, Github). Verbal communication is also primarily in English.

However, quite a few people working there can speak both English and Japanese fluently so Japanese may be spoken at times during meetings, especially when they involve teams other than engineering.

Overall, the language spoken depends on the team. The dev team uses mostly English, but their HR team (for example) speaks primarily Japanese.
Visa Sponsorship
Degica sponsors visas for candidates living outside of Japan. They’re still hiring from abroad, but due to travel restrictions related to COVID-19 new employees from abroad may need to start working on a contract basis. Degica will switch you over to a full-time employee contract and sponsor your visa once it’s safe to come to Japan again.

Degica also helps out with relocation (searching for apartments etc.) but they don’t have a formal policy for this. The support offered depends on each individual case. They do always pay for flight tickets to Japan in the case that someone moves from abroad however.
Paid Leave
Degica has a very generous vacation policy.

Like most companies in Japan, their basic PTO package starts with 10 days of normal paid time off during an employee’s first year, followed by increases in subsequent years in accordance with Japanese labor law.

Degica also offers 5 extra vacation days that can be used during the summer months, and another 5 days of year-end holidays.

They also have birthday leave, which means members can get an extra day off each year on their birthday. So that’s a total of 21 vacation days per year in addition to Japanese public holidays. They also offer maternity and paternity leave.
Benefits
💻 New tech gear

👩‍🎓 Skill development support

💛 Support for attending conferences

🧡 Seminar participation support

📕 Book purchases

👶 Parental Leave

👩‍🏫 Language Learning Support

💜 Social security / insurance benefits included

🏥 Healthcare insurance

💚 Pension insurance

🚃 Commuter allowance

👍 Motorized sitting / standing desks when working from our office
Engineer Interview Process
Engineering Jobs

Degica’s interview process skips the high-pressure whiteboard interviews in favor of a coding challenge that’s closer to what engineers would actually work on day-to-day.

Here’s the basic interview flow:
- First interview: Meeting with two Degica engineers to discuss about something you’ve built and see if you’re a good cultural fit
- Second interview: Technical challenge to test your real-world development skills
- Third interview: Meeting with a senior leader in the company
Remote Work
Degica allows full remote work from anywhere in the world! The only stipulation is that your work hours must have some overlap with the JST time zone.

Even once COVID-19 is no longer a concern, Degica intends to continue their full remote policy.

And if you do relocate to Japan, there's no need to live near their Tokyo office — you can work from anywhere in Japan.
Work style
Degica has an office in the Kichijoji area of Tokyo, but they’ve switched to working fully remotely due to COVID-19. A typical work day at Degica begins at around 10:00AM for most people. Some teams begin with a stand-up meeting where they quickly share their tasks for the day before focusing on work for the rest of the day.

One unique aspect of Degica’s work style is their code review process. Since they have a flat hierarchy and a relatively small team, they have a system where reviewers are selected randomly. Their engineers also take care of operations and handle errors or technical customer queries as a team via Slack.

A typical stopping time for engineers at Degica is at around 7:00PM, and they have very little overtime so engineers normally won’t be online past this time. They also make it a point to avoid unnecessary meetings and prefer to have ad-hoc discussions with relevant members only.
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