Consultancy: Product Manager Consultant - Blockchain Product & Partnerships, Office of Global Innovations - New York HQ

The UNICEF Office of Innovation is seeking a Product Manager Blockchain Product & Partnerships consultant. Duration: 11½ months.

UNICEF works in some of the world’s toughest places, to reach the world’s most disadvantaged children. To save their lives. To defend their rights. To help them fulfill their potential.

Across 190 countries and territories, we work for every child, everywhere, every day, to build a better world for everyone.

And we never give up.

For every child, innovate...

UNICEF has a 70-year history of innovating for children. We believe that new approaches, partnerships and technologies that support realizing children’s rights are critical to improving their lives. The Office of Innovation is a creative, interactive, and agile team in UNICEF. We sit at a unique intersection, where an organization that works on huge global issues meets the startup thinking, the technology, and the partners that turn this energy into scalable solutions.
 
UNICEF's Office of Innovation creates opportunities for the world's children by focusing on where new markets can meet their vital needs. We do this by:

• Connecting youth communities (or more broadly -- anyone disconnected or under-served) to decision-makers, and to each other, to deliver informed, relevant and sustained programmes that build better, stronger futures for children.
• Provoking change for children through an entrepreneurial approach -- in a traditionally risk-averse field -- to harness rapidly moving innovations and apply them to serve the needs of all children.
• Creating new models of partnership that leverage core business values across the public, private and academic sectors in order to deliver fast, and lasting results for children.

The Office of Innovation specifically looks to form partnerships around frontier technologies (like drones and UAVs, blockchain, 21st century skills, urban technologies, new banking tools, wearables and sensors, or 3D-Printing) that exist at the intersection of $100 billion business markets and 1 billion person needs – and to identify how they can grow and scale profitably and inclusively. 
  

OUR TEAM
We're an interdisciplinary team around the world tasked with identifying, prototyping, and scaling new technologies and practices. With our partners, we focus on convening and collaborating on new and different solutions, low- and high-tech,  by:

• Looking at the 2-5 year horizon to evaluate emerging and trending technologies and to see how UNICEF can work with the private sector on doing better business while improving essential services for children;
• Investing in early stage solutions that show great potential to positively impact children in the 0-2 year future including the Venture Fund that invests in open source technology solutions from start-ups based in UNICEF’s programme countries;
• Identifying proven solutions that can be implemented at national scale in multiple countries – taking the ideas that help thousands in one country, bringing them to dozens of countries across multiple sectors, and impacting the lives of millions of children.

How can you make a difference? 

Help us design the platform for, and partnerships around a set of distributed cryptographic applications to make the world better.   Build the narrative and collaborations around a new technology, create the methods for accessing this partnership, and work with a dedicated technology team to ensure that product is prototyped and iterated upon quickly.

This is a role for someone who has built open-source product before, and taken it to a large number of users.  You know about rapid testing, agile development (at least from a product-manager if not pro*ject*- manager point of view).  You can tell a story, sell an idea, and comfortable work with a distributed team of nerds to help build out a vision.  You understand the difference between ETH and ETC and can communicate it clearly in a tweet.  Or a few tweets.  You have an understanding of financial markets, exchanges, and smart contracts and (probably) find the term "fintech" frustrating.

Main responsibilities will be:

1. Coordinate and manage the development of technical prototypes of smart contracts and tokenizing;
2. Support identification and oversight of Country-level pilots of cryptographic technology;
3. Identify and manage various technical, financial, programmatic partners;
4. Key point of contact for internal and external stakeholders  and partners
5. Documentation and communications (both written and in presentations) of the work.

Background on our cypto work:

Over time, people have used different types of money to exchange value, from colored stones, seashells, precious metals, paper money to today’s emerging blockchain technologies. Blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum allow us as well as machines/things to have money systems on which we can run currency as an application. These systems are decentralized, have no central points of control, are powered by the internet and can be governed by smart contracts. Smart contracts allow anyone to design and run their own tokens as a digital currency to express loyalty, organization or to represent ownership of physical items.

At UNICEF we are trying to delve deeper into understanding the technical, social, ethical and legal challenges of utilizing these emerging technologies in our complex and interconnected world. The purpose of this role is to manage  UNICEF Innovation’s latest blockchain application. This role will be supported by a technical engineering team (full stack + part time UX)

To qualify as a champion for every child you will have…

• Advanced degree in a relevant field or equivalent professional experience.
• Experience building products.
• Working between technical (open source, full stack) teams and management / c-level)
• Ability to work with global / distributed teams.
• 5-8 years of relevant work experience in technology product development, project and partnership management  
• Technical understanding of decentralized systems and blockchain networks (e.g Bitcoin and Ethereum, DApps, DAOs, and doh's).
• Piloting and scaling of technology solutions in UNICEF programme countries desired
• Experience engaging with stakeholders from different backgrounds and coordinating multi stakeholder activities.
• Demonstrated outstanding analytical and quantitative skills, and the ability to conduct independent research.
• Demonstrated ability to translate clearly complex issues for a non-technical audience.
• Familiarity with international development;
• Experience of working in UNICEF program countries is a plus.
• Knowledge of economics and financial markets is a plus.

Applications must include:

• Cover letter, including link(s) to any demo
• CV
• Please indicate your qualifications, availability as well as your financial bid, i.e. daily/monthly rate (in US$), to undertake the terms of reference above.  Applications submitted without a financial bid will not be considered further.

Payment Plan:

• Monthly payment, based on monthly tasks and progress reports, approved upon monthly review with supervisor.
• Consultant is responsible for his own health insurance
• Consultant is eligible for standard DSA for all work-related travel
• Consultants are responsible for assuming costs for obtaining visas and travel insurance

UNICEF is committed to diversity and inclusion within its workforce, and encourages qualified female and male candidates from all national, religious and ethnic backgrounds, including persons living with disabilities, to apply to become a part of our organisation.

Remarks:

Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted and advance to the next stage of the selection process.