Operations Excellence Lead

Future Lab Studio, Innovation Village’s Venture Building, Founder Support and Corporate Innovation Unit is seeking a world-class Operations Excellence Lead to oversee operational efficiency across the unit.

About the Innovation Village

The Innovation Village is Uganda’s launchpad for leading innovators and entrepreneurs. We are building an entire ecosystem of entrepreneurs and innovators in what is growing to become a business solutions provider for our biggest challenges or opportunities. From helping entrepreneurs launch and grow high-impact ventures to attracting regional and global opportunities, our ecosystem approach converges multiple partners including public, private, academia, research, and civil society as one force for good.

Through regional spaces in the capital Kampala, Jinja to the eastern, Gulu to the northern and Mbarara to the western parts of the Uganda, Innovation Village fuels the growth of game-changing founders, startups and enterprises that can positively transform our communities and economies.

About Future Lab Studio

Future Lab Studio (“the Studio”) partners with and supports exceptional Founders and Executives solving Africa’s most pressing challenges by using technology to overcome systemic constraints. Leveraging multisectoral innovation themes cutting across various technologies, the Studio empowers innovators through a range of innovation, incubation, and acceleration journeys to build, refine or scale scalable solutions, and to access market opportunities from across our partner network, connecting the best progressing teams to stage-relevant capital from across the Studio’s capital ecosystem.

The Opportunity

At our core, the Studio convenes outstanding opportunities, tools, capital, and advice that empower Founders and Executives building and scaling category-leading tech and tech-enabled solutions to Africa’s pressing challenges.

We do this through multisectoral Innovation Clusters in areas like Automating Trust, Digital Inclusion and Climate Action where we converge Founders, Executives, Domain Experts and Investors with the passion, dedication, networks, experience and expertise in solving for the most complex challenges in these thematic areas using technology. We are especially keen on the intersection of the thematic topics with our focus on Agriculture, Education and MSME sectors.

We are looking for a world-class Operations Excellence Lead to oversee our efforts to scale efficiency across the unit. This strategic role directly impacts our ability to deliver a delightful partner experience while optimizing value captured, both crucial to our success.

You will lead arriving at mission-critical policy and strategic decisions, have responsibility for our ability to deliver delightful Partner experiences at every touchpoint and across every interaction, and have oversight of the nexus between value creation and value capture across our broad spectrum of activities, among others.

You have a solid mastery of modern and emerging technology, management and innovation practices, and their application in powering strategy design and implementation.

You have vast experience in running and streamlining corporate-facing programs and processes. You excel in breaking down issues into key components and design analytical and operational approaches to identify solutions. You are detail oriented, highly organized, and comfortable working in a fast-paced environment. You are passionate about technology, startups, innovation and the potential they have to cause transformational change across industry. You have a solid understanding of financial management. You are an expert in organizational effectiveness and operations management.

You are a bold and self-motivated independent professional that is highly collaborative. You possess a deep sense of personal and professional integrity and work best in a fast-paced startup environment, driven by a deep sense of mission.

You will work closely with the Future Lab Studio Lead and other Studio executives to design and execute our strategy. Among others, you will manage cross-functional programs in a matrix organization covering a range of areas; set strategic goals for operational efficiency and increased productivity; plan, monitor, and analyze key metrics for day-to-day operations to ensure efficient and timely completion of tasks; maximize efficiency and productivity through extensive process analysis and interdepartmental collaboration; collaborate with senior managers in the development of performance goals and long-term operational plans; identify most critical issues to resolve; perform risk management and change management on projects; run cross-functional working team meetings efficiently and effectively, with ability to connect dots and influence key decisions; run key analyses to assess and flesh out select initiatives through synthesizing external/market facts and data and using internal data sets; Identify key metrics and set up KPIs to track initiative and product performance, and provide strong problem-solving leadership related to shaping strategic focus and operational approach for emerging business initiatives, among others. Specifically, you will:

• Inform, influence, and execute new strategies and operational tactics for new products/business lines using sound analysis and impact metrics to support positions.
• Project management or program management for all phases of projects and strategic initiatives including diagnostics, analysis, solutioning, roadmapping, implementation, and post-implementation phases.
• Capacity management across the various Studio units spanning the entire journey of managing our client and portfolio pipeline, initial relationship development to a finalized partnership and scope of work, to staffing assignment and management of that work, through evaluation, project pipeline refinement, and renewed partnership.
• Devise strategies for ensuring the growth of programs and initiatives enterprise-wide, and implement process improvements to maximize output and optimize costs.

• 10+ years’ experience, with at least 5 years in Strategy or Management Consulting, or leading Business Operations in the Professional Services or Entrepreneur Support sectors
• Have considerable Project or Program Management Experience
• Have experience in developing or transforming growth strategies or new business ventures
• Experience being part of the founding team or an early operator of a high-growth startup that successfully closed funding an added advantage
• Worked in an environment where service design, design thinking, change management, UX design, design sprints and digital innovation are daily used
• Possess strong general consulting skills and can overcome internal barriers through drive and determination.
• Have experience with or knowledge of working in Agile environments.
• Solid network of multidisciplinary executive-level relationships across East Africa.
• Strong ability to cultivate and maintain high valued relationships and manage multiple counterparties and workstreams.
• Experience navigating ambiguous information and crafting a stable but flexible operational plan / systems to make business decisions based on those variables.
• Culturally and functionally agile and a strong business and thought partner who works collaboratively and effectively cross-functionally with colleagues at all levels in an organization.
• Highly comfortable in fluid, rapidly changing environments with a proven ability to work independently and demonstrate problem-solving leadership with limited oversight.
• Experience coaching and supporting Senior Leadership towards sustained change.
• Exceptional ability to break down and solve problems through quantitative thinking, modeling, and analysis.
• Outstanding research skills and the ability to integrate multiple data sources to inform complex problems.
• Exceptional ability to communicate complex ideas effectively.

Why You Might Be Excited About Us

• Opportunity to impact the direction and success of Future Lab Studio, and by extension, The Innovation Village
• An opportunity to build deep understanding of venture capital, early-stage investing, and what makes early-stage companies successful
• The platform to influence the creation and delivery of ground-breaking innovations with the ability to create better outcomes for millions of Ugandans and beyond.