Product Owner, Integrated Payables

Zact Inc.•Sunnyvale, CA

About The Position

Zact is a fintech company that helps organizations simplify expense and payment management by aligning employees, finance, and accounting through stronger controls, cleaner workflows, and continuous reconciliation to financial systems. The Product Owner, Integrated Payables is a hands-on product leader responsible for defining, prioritizing, and delivering Zact’s accounts payable and business payments product, which banks offer to their commercial customers. The product supports an end-to-end invoice-to-reconciled-payment lifecycle: invoices are received by email, upload, or payment instruction file; OCR’d and coded; routed for approval; paid by virtual card, ACH, or check; and posted to the customer’s accounting system. The role combines Product Owner and Technical Product Manager responsibilities. The Product Owner owns both what gets built and how it gets delivered, without separate project managers. This includes participating in every Integrated Payables sprint call, coordinating with the Bank Delivery team to prioritize bank needs, continually grooming the backlog, and personally driving features from requirements through release. The successful candidate will bring product judgment, technical fluency, and practical understanding of payables operations and how banks and card processors deliver commercial payments. The role will help make Integrated Payables a compelling reason for banks to choose Zact and support virtual card adoption and revenue.

Requirements

At least 5 years of experience as a Product Owner, Product Manager, or Business Analyst, ideally on B2B SaaS or fintech products.
Demonstrated ability to write clear user stories, acceptance criteria, and functional requirements for complex workflows.
Hands-on experience working in Agile/Scrum teams and leading backlog refinement, sprint planning, and sprint reviews.
Comfort operating in a fast-paced, entrepreneurial environment where priorities evolve and initiative matters.
Experience owning end-to-end delivery as a Technical Product Manager, TPM, or Product Owner without dedicated project management support.
Technical fluency to engage engineers on APIs, data models, integrations, and system design, and to make sound scope and sequencing trade-offs.
Experience planning releases, managing dependencies across teams and external partners, and keeping delivery on track.
Proficiency with Agile delivery tools such as Jira or Azure DevOps.
Strong understanding of accounts payable processes, including invoice capture, coding, approvals, PO matching, and payment runs.
Working knowledge of B2B payment rails, including virtual cards, ACH, wires, and checks, and of vendor enrollment and card acceptance programs.
Familiarity with OCR/AI invoice extraction, payment instruction files, and accounting or ERP integrations.
Understanding of cash- and accrual-based accounting and how AP data flows to the general ledger.
Ability to break complex business problems into clear, buildable increments and make sound prioritization trade-offs.
Comfort working with data to measure product performance and inform decisions.
Strong attention to detail, particularly around edge cases, exceptions, and controls in financial workflows.
Ability to work closely with engineering, QA, design, Bank Delivery, sales, and partner teams.
Strong written and verbal communication skills, including explaining technical concepts to business audiences and business needs to technical teams.
Ability to engage directly with banks, business customers, and partners to gather requirements and validate solutions.
BS/BA degree or equivalent professional experience.

Nice To Haves

SQL or reporting tool experience.
Past experience at Bill.com, AvidXchange, or MineralTree.
Experience with AP automation or payables platforms such as Tipalti.
Experience in commercial banking, treasury management, commercial cards, or card processing.
Familiarity with fraud prevention, payment security, and compliance requirements in financial services.

Responsibilities

Build a deep understanding of Integrated Payables, business customer AP workflows, the bank distribution model, and the competitive landscape.
Own the Integrated Payables product vision and backlog, balancing bank commitments, revenue opportunities, technical debt, and long-term direction.
Translate business needs into clear user stories, acceptance criteria, workflows, and edge cases.
Define and improve invoice capture and OCR/AI extraction, PIF imports, GL coding, PO matching, approval workflows, and payment authorization.
Drive payment execution across single-use and multi-use virtual cards, ACH, and checks, with an emphasis on increasing card adoption.
Own vendor-facing capabilities, including vendor enrollment, vendor portal, remittance advice, and supplier card acceptance programs.
Ensure product controls include role-based permissions, multi-factor authentication for sensitive actions, fraud prevention, and complete audit trails.
Identify opportunities to use AI and automation to reduce manual work across the payables lifecycle.
Attend Integrated Payables stand-ups, backlog refinement, sprint planning, sprint reviews, and retrospectives as the engineering team’s day-to-day product partner.
Own end-to-end feature delivery, including release planning, progress tracking, dependency management, and removing blockers.
Work with engineering on technical design, APIs, data flows, and integration approaches, making informed scope and sequencing trade-offs.
Coordinate delivery across dependent teams and partners, including processors, card issuing and payment rails, accounting and ERP integrations, and QA.
Manage delivery risks, issues, and scope or timeline changes, and communicate status to leadership, Bank Delivery, and sales.
Accept completed work against acceptance criteria, lead user acceptance testing, and ensure releases meet quality expectations.
Own release readiness, including release notes, product documentation, and enablement content for banks, sales, and customer success.
Work with Bank Delivery to understand bank requirements, implementation timelines, and go-live commitments.
Continually groom and reprioritize the backlog based on bank needs, reflecting bank commitments in sprint plans and delivering them on time.
Participate in bank implementation discussions as the product expert, clarify requirements, set expectations, and resolve product questions.
Triage bank-reported issues and enhancement requests with bank delivery and support, and prioritize them in the backlog.
Engage with banks, business customers, sales, and implementation teams to gather feedback, validate solutions, and support demos and active opportunities.
Establish and use product and delivery metrics, such as sprint predictability, on-time bank commitments, straight-through processing rates, and card payment mix, to guide prioritization.