Director - Product Management - Merchant App & Platform - FinTech

Responsibilities:

Lead a team of 4-5 high performing, senior product managers & lead the strategy and execution of building highly scalable, resilient & complex platform products which are used millions of times a day across all the merchant & consumer products at company's and also the internal teams like Risk, Marketing, Growth etc; Just to give a small glimpse, a subset of your portfolio looks like owning the below:

- You will be managing complicated products like centralized KYC service which encapsulates regular KYC, video KYC, in-person verification;

- Messaging service which encapsulates sms, push notification, in-app notification, WA based messaging;

- Marketing platforms like Plotline, CleverTap etc

- Centralised CRM Support tool for empowering help ticket resolution across the company

- and many more (FSE app, Core Merchant app etc)

Now to give you a small glimpse of the complexity, for the services above you need to create fallbacks, retrial, cost based re-routing, async handling et al

On top of that, you will be leading Products like the Merchant App & the Captain app which enables our 10K plus FSEs to do their tasks in a super productive way

You will report directly to the Chief Product Officer & the team you lead will be working closely with every single other departments to ensure our products not only fulfill customer needs but also drive our business growth in a sustainable way

This is a very central role because every platform you build impacts almost all the product

Responsibilities will include

Functional Expertise

1. Needs to clear understanding the difference between a platform vs a product; Without this, its going to be impossible to succeed in this role

2. Build the underlying platform that powers future feature development of multiple merchant & consumer facing products.

3. Should be able to thoroughly understand the need of the end user YET understand you won't be creating the roadmap of end user functionality & design

4. Have a good understanding of how APIs work, what different API protocols exist & are willing to get your hands dirty in terms of testing things (eg: use tools like Postman etc) before the API is shipped

5. Wherever applicable, be an ambassador of a cross platform vision rather than a standalone feature.

6. Drives process improvements at a platform product level, suggests improvements at a cross-team/cross-Org level

7. Understand & hold their team accountable for a healthy set of platform level metrics

8. Has exceptional written & verbal communication skills;

9. Has a passion for new & emerging platforms technologies with anMerhc ear plugged firmly to the industry trends

10. Has managed high performing senior product managers in the past

Problem Solving

1. Able to synthesize wide range of customer inputs (research, data etc) to identify underlying problems of customer segments across different product lines

2. Benchmark against top platforms of the world (used to solve the common problem statement) & then create the roadmap basis that

3. Be agile with their own roadmap creation; This could primarily be due to the potentially roadmaps of other product teams which become volatile due to regulation or black swan events

4. Balancing the introduction of new features with the optimization of existing ones

5. Utilize data-driven decision-making to assess product performance and drive improvements based on key metrics.

Interaction:

1. Independently manages complex stakeholder relationships with little to no support from manager; Presents activities to senior management with little support

2. Builds exceptional relationship with PMs & Engg counterparts of all businesses; Without high level of empathy, its impossible to build great products which are adopted across the org

3. Careful management of user expectations and timelines because unlike quickly iterating & shipping products, platform products require longer release cycles.

4. Has ability to drive consensus and if not get folks to disagree & commit; Awareness and detailed understanding of overall business and industry context

5. Recognized as a mentor for other PMs who may or may not have Platform building expertise

To succeed in the role

Impact

- Define long-term strategy & vision for Merchant Apps & Platform; provides strategic influence across teams and functions

Qualification & Experience (type & industry):

- BE/B.Tech or equivalent Degree. MBA is good to have

- 10+ Yrs of PM experience with atleast 4-5 yrs building platform products; Preferred past experience in high growth stage startups

- Comprehensive knowledge of financial systems, lending operations, and payment platforms

Skills & know-how:

- High degree of competency with project management including: project planning, issue and risk identification and management, tracking dependencies and breakthroughs, and communication of overall project status.

- Technically minded and basic understanding on Agile development, web & app technologies

- Product Management experience desired, ideally in fintech space

- Past success delivering high quality products at scale in a complex environment