SVP – Digital and Customer Platforms — Tower And Infrastructure Portfolio

The mandate

Operator tenants interact with the portfolio through account teams, engineering exchanges, order systems, access desks, energy reports and project updates. Information is fragmented across tools and local teams. A tenant may see a site as available before structural, power or access constraints are understood; modification orders move through opaque handoffs; and capital requests are raised without a consistent connection to qualified tenant demand. Both sides spend time reconciling status rather than planning capacity.

The SVP – Digital and Customer Platforms will create a coherent tenant and investment workflow. The remit covers tenant-facing product strategy, site and capacity discovery, order and modification journeys, access services, energy information, project visibility, product management, experience design, engineering and platform operations. Commercial and infrastructure leaders own customer and capital decisions; enterprise technology owns core systems; the SVP is accountable for usable products and trustworthy interfaces that connect them.

This planned replacement is not a brief to replace relationship management with self-service. Tower orders and site changes can require technical negotiation, permits and local knowledge. Digital products should make evidence, ownership and progress visible so experts focus on decisions rather than status chasing. The executive must also avoid publishing false precision where capacity remains subject to engineering validation.

Scope and operating context

Based onsite in Johannesburg, the role influences approximately 1,425 employees and material partners across South Africa and a wider international region. Direct leaders will span product management, engineering, architecture, design, data interfaces, platform reliability and adoption. Commercial, structural engineering, energy, property, access, project delivery, finance and regulatory teams are critical matrix partners.

The portfolio includes towers and related infrastructure with different tenancy, structural, energy, fibre, spectrum-environment and property constraints. Site data has developed through acquisition and local operation, so definitions and quality vary. A digital catalogue must communicate confidence and validation stage rather than convert every record into an unqualified promise.

Tenant organisations also differ in process and integration maturity. Large operators may need machine-to-machine inventory and order exchange; smaller customers may use guided portal journeys. Product architecture should support both without forcing the portfolio to maintain unrelated workflows for every account.

First-year agenda

The first one hundred days will trace priority tenant journeys from search and feasibility through quote, order, design, permission, build, access, acceptance and billing. The SVP will review service contacts, delay, manual re-entry, data disputes, platform reliability and adoption. Several recent capital interventions will be traced back to the tenant evidence that initiated them.

The executive will then define a tenant-platform architecture. Core capabilities will include site identity, available attributes, capacity confidence, opportunity, order state, document exchange, access request, energy and project milestone. Each field and event will have an authoritative source, owner, freshness and customer-visibility rule. Sensitive network, security and commercial data will remain appropriately restricted.

Site discovery and feasibility will be redesigned first. Tenants should be able to identify plausible options using meaningful criteria and understand what still requires validation. The product must route requests to the right technical and property owners and preserve assumptions through quote and order. Repeated searches with no capacity can become evidence for targeted investment, but expressed interest cannot be treated as committed demand.

Order and modification visibility is a second priority. Milestones will reflect real dependencies such as structural analysis, landlord consent, power, equipment, permit and tenant design. Changes and pauses need named ownership and clear consequences. Tenants should receive accurate progress and escalation without relying on informal messages.

The SVP will also connect platform data to the capital process. Qualified demand, lost opportunities, constrained sites, energy needs and delivery history should inform investment cases. Finance and infrastructure leaders will agree confidence levels and decision rights. By year-end, selected markets and tenants should show shorter cycle time, fewer status contacts and better conversion of qualified demand into capital decisions.

Leadership responsibilities

The SVP will own product strategy, engineering delivery, platform service and adoption. They will chair prioritisation with commercial and infrastructure leaders, ensuring roadmaps address tenant and capital decisions rather than feature requests alone. Each release must have an operating owner and retirement path for the process it replaces.

The role will build internal product and technical ownership. Vendors may provide packages, integration or capacity, but site, order and investment logic must remain understood inside the portfolio. The SVP will assess leaders, strengthen succession and create engineering and reliability practices appropriate to critical B2B workflows.

Tenant adoption requires partnership. Account and project teams will be trained to use the platform as the authoritative journey, not maintain parallel status sheets. Feedback from operators and field teams will shape backlog decisions. Where platform data is wrong, correction and communication must be fast and traceable.

Measures of success

The executive committee will review tenant adoption, feasible-site search, quote and order cycle, milestone accuracy, access completion, status contacts, platform availability and change failure. Capital measures include qualified demand visibility, constrained opportunities, investment conversion and forecast reliability.

Data and product health will include critical-field quality, lineage, freshness, duplicate process retirement and internal ownership. Tenant satisfaction will focus on transparency and resolution. Portal logins or published-site counts without completed decisions will not count as value.

Candidate profile

Candidates should bring 22–28 years in digital product, platform engineering or customer technology across telecommunications, infrastructure, utilities, logistics or another complex B2B asset business. They must have led products that connect customer order, engineering validation and capital delivery across countries.

The board will seek examples of publishing capacity with appropriate confidence, reducing B2B order opacity and using platform demand to change an asset-investment decision. Candidates should understand spatial and asset data, workflow, integrations, access and commercial confidentiality.

The successful SVP will be technically credible and comfortable with infrastructure uncertainty. They must challenge commercial promises and engineering opacity and communicate clearly with operator customers and the board. Experience across African and international infrastructure markets is valuable.

Compensation and appointment terms

The anticipated base range is ZAR 6,800,000–9,200,000, with annual incentive and long-term participation linked to tenant, platform and enterprise value. Final positioning will reflect relevant asset complexity, B2B platform depth and current arrangements. Relocation or responsible treatment of forfeited awards will be assessed individually.

Confidentiality

The portfolio is unnamed because site, tenant and capital information is sensitive. Detailed platform and asset evidence will be disclosed only after identity, conflict and confidentiality checks. Applications must anonymise tenant orders, capacity data, network locations and unpublished capital plans from other organisations.