Principal Product Manager – Payment Operations Value Stream

About the role: 

The Payment Operations Experience Manager is responsible for translating the Payment Operations value stream strategy into a clear, actionable roadmap that delivers end-to-end capabilities across the payments lifecycle—customer onboarding and eligibility, risk and compliance controls, deterministic financial meaning (ledgering/classification), authorization and movement of funds, reconciliation and exception handling, reporting, and auditability.

The role leads prioritization across SAFe Agile Release Trains, aligns stakeholders on the right outcomes, then drives execution through a prioritized feature roadmap and measurable outcomes.   

What you'll be expected to do: 

• Translate Payment Operations value stream strategy into an experience roadmap that drives measurable business impact.

• Partner with Value Stream Owner, Business Architects, and Solution Architects to maintain unified vision across Payment Operations capabilities. 

• Ensure alignment with GTM strategy, AOP, and long-range planning outcomes. 
• Build and refine a prioritized Feature backlog for the Payment Operations value stream. 

• Collaborate with Product Owners to ensure high-quality decomposition into user stories. 

• Resolve intra-ART priority conflicts using economic impact and value scoring. 

• Lead both the software changes and associated business process changes. 

• Lead definition of end-to-end journey improvements across Payment Operations capabilities, balancing customer experience, operational efficiency, and control requirements. 

• Drive friction reduction and reliability improvements across payment experiences while maintaining regulatory, risk, and compliance standards. 

• Partner with internal teams that rely on Payment Operations (e.g., product, support, finance, risk/compliance, and customer success) to align on experience design and operational readiness. 

• Lead Feature refinement, estimation, and prioritization for PI Planning. 

• Align the Payment Operations backlog with Enterprise, Value Stream, and platform priorities, including capacity and funding guardrails. 

• Participate in ART events including PI Planning, System Demos, and Inspect & Adapt sessions. 

• Enter Features into Agile Lifecycle Management tool (Azure DevOps). 

• Demonstrates updated functionality in System Demos. 

• Collaborate across Operations, Product, Risk/Compliance, Finance, Legal, Customer Support/Success, and IT to align feature scope with operational impact, controls, and readiness. 

• Influence without authority to drive shared accountability across the value stream. 

• Define and track KPIs and partner with analytics teams to monitor performance and adjust improvements accordingly. 

• Accept features when they meet the Definition of Done. 

What we'll want you to have:

• 8 years or more years of Product Management, Experience Design experience 

• 5 or more years of Payments/Product Operations, or Value Stream leadership (SaaS preferred). 

• Demonstrated experience leading cross-functional delivery teams in Agile/Scrum or SAFe environments. 

• Demonstrated ability to manage complex multi-stakeholder backlogs. 

• Strong analytical capability and prioritization skills including WSJF or similar frameworks. 

• Excellent communication and facilitation skills. 

• Experience leading integrated changes across payment processing systems and operational processes (e.g., exceptions, reconciliation, disputes), including controls, documentation, and change management. 

Preferred Qualifications 

• Product management experience in Fintech SaaS products and services 

• SAFe PMPO certification. 

• Experience working in or with SAFe Agile Release Trains (ARTs) and PI Planning, including feature definition, WSJF-based prioritization, and dependency management. 

• Experience with end-to-end payment processing and operations, including authorization, settlement, refunds, disputes, fraud/risk, and reconciliation. 

• Experience defining technical and user requirements in Application Lifecycle Management software such as AzureDevOps or JIRA. 

• Familiarity with enterprise data and architecture domains. 

• Experience leveraging AI/ML-enabled platforms to automate operational workflows (e.g., payments processing, reconciliation, exception handling, KYC/AML reviews). 

• Proven ability to identify high value AI use cases and translate them into measurable operational outcomes (cost, risk, cycle time, accuracy). 

• Ability to deliver work which meets all minimum standards of quality, security and operability.