Lead Product Manager

Ascend•San Francisco, CA

4d•$180,000 - $240,000•Onsite

About The Position

Ascend is looking for a Lead Product Manager to define the vision and strategy for our core money movement products. You'll start by partnering with an existing product manager and grow into owning this product area overall. These products span integrations, invoicing, payments, receivables, financing, payouts, funds flow, and the full payment lifecycle. They're closely connected. You'll own vision, strategy, and execution for a defined set of products and also align priorities and sequencing across all of them. Enterprise and strategic customers rely on these products to run increasingly complex financial operations. A big part of the job is using AI to automate those operations. You'll measure where automation is working, find where it isn't, and keep cutting the manual work it takes for customers to close their books. This role mixes strategy with hands-on technical product work. You'll work directly with customers, write product and technical specs, and work closely with engineering to define how the system behaves and to make tradeoffs. Many of these workflows have never been automated before, so you'll often need to define the problem before you can solve it. You'll be accountable for measurable gains in adoption, operational efficiency, automation, and revenue.

Requirements

6+ years of product management experience, including 3+ years owning the vision, strategy, and outcomes for a major product area
A track record of translating product strategy into successful launches and measurable customer and business results
Experience building for enterprise customers with complex workflows and integration requirements
Hands-on experience writing product and technical specifications, with clear requirements, edge cases, and acceptance criteria
Technical and analytical fluency to work with engineers on APIs, data models, and interconnected systems, and use data to guide decisions
Clear communication and the ability to articulate a compelling vision, make tradeoffs, and align cross-functional teams

Nice To Haves

B2B product experience in fintech, billing, or payments
Experience in insurance, premium finance, lending, or loan management systems
Experience building public APIs, platform integrations, or financial infrastructure at scale
Experience building AI products or applying AI to financial workflows

Responsibilities

Learn Ascend's platform, how customers work today, and how money moves through our system
Talk with customers about their financial operations: where they get stuck, where they still work by hand, and what they'll need as they grow
Work with Engineering to understand the APIs, data models, system behavior, and dependencies between products
Review the AI and automation already in place: what's working, where exceptions and manual touches still happen, and what drives them
Present an initial assessment of the biggest opportunities, backed by customer feedback and data
Define a product vision and strategy based on customer needs and Ascend's business goals
Set a baseline for operational efficiency, such as manual touches, exception rates, and turnaround time, and set targets for reducing it
Turn the strategy into a quarterly roadmap with clear priorities, tradeoffs, and expected outcomes
Write product and technical specs for the top initiatives, covering workflows, system requirements, edge cases, and acceptance criteria
Align product, engineering, and leadership on priorities, sequencing, and how success will be measured
Own and evolve the product vision, and take on more of the product area over time
Build AI into the core of product workflows to automate manual work and exception handling, with the goal of reducing the time and effort customers spend on their financial operations
Track how well automation performs, find where it falls short, and keep improving it
Build capabilities and tooling that scale with enterprise complexity and growth
Lead initiatives from discovery and spec through launch and adoption, and be accountable for the results
Work with Engineering on API requirements, data flows, failure scenarios, and system tradeoffs
Test ideas with prototypes and early releases, and make clear calls on scope and sequencing
Work across Design, Engineering, GTM, and Operations to simplify financial workflows and anticipate how changes affect other teams and products