Director - Digital Product Management

American Express•Phoenix, AZ

About The Position

The Director, Acquirer APIs & Services leads product strategy and execution for a portfolio of acquiring capabilities, including merchant onboarding and maintenance, disputes, and reconciliation. Reporting to the Vice President, Value Delivery Product, this product leadership role owns what the products and capabilities do, how they work and evolve, and how they create value. The Director partners with Value Delivery on investment, value narratives, go-to-market readiness, and adoption. The role calls for moving fluidly between customer problems and commercial opportunities and the technical details of API behavior, data models, service workflows, and architecture tradeoffs. Working directly with Technology and Product Delivery, the Director shapes solutions, challenges constraints, and ensures APIs are coherent, scalable, secure, and practical for external partners. The Director sets the portfolio’s target state and multi-year roadmap, modernizes existing services, develops new API and data capabilities, and connects those capabilities to measurable customer, operational, and commercial outcomes.

Requirements

Preferred 6+ years of product management or technical product leadership experience, including ownership of APIs, data products, platforms, or other complex B2B services used by external customers or partners.
Deep understanding of modern API and service architectures, including REST, event-driven models, webhooks, asynchronous processing, data contracts, security, performance, observability, versioning, and backward compatibility; ability to read and challenge detailed technical artifacts.
Demonstrated ability to move from an ambiguous customer or business problem to a coherent target-state product and technical solution while making pragmatic delivery tradeoffs.
Proven ability to build technically complex products around real customer workflows and connect product decisions to adoption, revenue, operational efficiency, and measurable business value.
Exceptional ability to earn trust, influence without authority, navigate a complex matrix, and create productive partnerships across Product, Technology, Architecture, Risk, Operations, and Commercial teams.
Track record of delivering durable products in demanding environments, with strong ownership, attention to detail, intellectual curiosity, and a bias toward action and measurable outcomes.
Ability to connect market and technology shifts to a clear product strategy and translate it into an executable roadmap.
Proven ability to modernize legacy capabilities, lead complex cross-functional change, and improve how product and technology teams work together from strategy through execution.
Outstanding communication skills, including the ability to make complex product and technical topics clear, concise, and decision-oriented for audiences ranging from engineers to senior executives.
Eligibility to work in the United States; the company will not pursue visa sponsorship for these positions.

Responsibilities

Own the strategy and roadmap for acquiring APIs and services.
Define the target-state product, balancing new capabilities, modernization, partner migration, and retirement of legacy services.
Translate customer needs, market trends, and technology developments into differentiated, commercially viable product opportunities.
Own the full product lifecycle, from discovery and solution design through build, launch, adoption, and ongoing evolution.
Translate complex needs into clear requirements, API behaviors, domain models, workflows, non-functional requirements, and acceptance criteria.
Work hands-on with Technology and Architecture to review and challenge API specifications, schemas, integration flows, and solution tradeoffs.
Drive prioritization and product KPIs across customer value, reliability, data quality, adoption, revenue, and cost-to-serve.
Engage directly with partners, merchants, developers, and internal users to validate product decisions and solve end-to-end problems.
Partner with teams on value propositions, packaging, pricing, go-to-market, and adoption.
Develop business cases and ensure roadmap priorities reflect customer outcomes, scalability, and commercial potential.
Support strategic partner and sales discussions with product, technical, and commercial expertise.
Lead across GMNS, Technology, Operations, Risk, Compliance, Pricing, Commercial, and Servicing to drive coordinated execution.
Build trust, challenge assumptions constructively, surface risks early, and create clarity in a highly matrixed environment.
Raise the product and technical bar through customer-centered design, reusable models, complete workflows, and strong lifecycle management.
Distill complex product and architecture topics into clear recommendations, tradeoffs, and decisions for senior leadership.