Purpose:

A leading financial services company is seeking a Technical Product Manager who is responsible for the integrity, performance, and continuous improvement of the lending product lending system. The lending product is operated by company in partnership with their partners and serves as the system backbone for their partner's SME lending product. This role has one direct report: the Product Operations Analyst.

A thorough understanding of the lending product business — its commercial model, lending mechanics, and operational context — is essential. This business knowledge forms the foundation for sound technical product decisions; without it, requirements cannot be properly interpreted or prioritised. Working alongside the Head of the lending product (to whom this role reports) and the Head of Product Operations, the TPM plays a central role in managing and evolving the product.

The role also requires a working understanding of data and analytics, as the TPM will be expected to help define and deliver key system and product reporting outputs.

Key Job Outputs:

Requirements & Functional Specification

• Translate business and partner requirements into clear, detailed functional specifications for the development team
• Maintain a living requirement backlog that reflects current our partner expectations and internal product operations needs
• Ensure all development work is traceable to a documented business requirement

Development Scoping & Delivery

• Scope development work with engineers, decomposing requirements into deliverable units with clear acceptance criteria
• Negotiate and align development team capacity against committed PI planning delivery windows
• Track delivery progress and proactively surface risks to schedule or scope

PI Planning with our partner

• Lead and coordinate PI planning cycles with our partner as the company counterpart
• Prepare planning inputs, capacity commitments, and dependency maps ahead of each PI cycle
• Operate effectively in a junior-partner dynamic — organised, well-prepared, and diplomatically assertive when managing scope and timeline expectations

Product Operations Collaboration

• Partner with the Product Operations team to identify system gaps, usability issues, and enhancement opportunities
• Translate operational feedback into prioritised development items

Roadmap & Prioritisation

• Consolidate priorities across PI planning cycles and internal business unit demands (including credit, operations, and other functional stakeholders) into a single, coherent product roadmap
• Maintain a live roadmap reflecting business objectives, delivery milestones, and dependencies — balancing our partner commitments against internal product priorities
• Communicate roadmap status and trade-offs clearly to both internal leadership and Partner counterparts

Deployment & Release Management

• Own the end-to-end deployment process: change control, release scheduling, UAT coordination, and post-deployment verification
• Align deployment cycles with our partner readiness at both technical and business levels, ensuring timeous and well-planned releases
• Maintain a live deployment register and release calendar aligned to SBSA change governance requirements
• Serve as the go/no-go decision point for production releases, ensuring readiness criteria are met before any deployment proceeds

Incident & Bug Management

• Coordinate technical incident resolution in partnership with the Tech Support team, taking ownership of the solutioning and resolution process once an incident has been logged and handed over by Product Operations
• Work within the established incident flow: Product Operations identifies and logs incidents, engages Tech Support, and the TPM leads resolution alongside the Tech Support team from handover
• Contribute to defect tracking and bug prioritisation in collaboration with the Tech Support team, ensuring open items are visible, sequenced, and progressing toward resolution
• Produce structured incident write-ups and post-mortems covering root cause, business impact, and corrective actions
• Develop and maintain runbooks for known recurring failure patterns to reduce resolution time on repeat incidents

Governance Reporting

• Prepare and present the technical delivery update for weekly OPCO and Manco, covering active workstreams, open incidents, deployment pipeline, and risk items
• Maintain the issues and initiatives tracker, ensuring accurate status is reflected ahead of each governance cycle

Quality Assurance

• Own QA sign-off on completed development work before handover to Product Operations for final acceptance testing
• Define and maintain QA checklists and acceptance criteria aligned to functional specifications

Core Competencies:

• Demonstrated ability to write clear, unambiguous functional specifications
• Strong systems literacy — able to understand the lending product architecture sufficiently to challenge scope, assess feasibility, and escalate meaningfully
• Proven ability to influence without authority: securing delivery commitment from development teams and managing partner expectations without direct line control
• Comfortable holding ground in a junior-partner relationship — structured, well-prepared, and credible under scrutiny
• Working understanding of data and analytics, with the ability to define and drive delivery of key system and product reporting

Experience:

• Prior experience in fintech, lending, or regulated financial products
• Familiarity with PI planning or SAFe Agile frameworks
• Experience working across partner or multi-stakeholder delivery environments

Salary: Market related

Should you not hear from us within 2 weeks, kindly consider your application as unsuccessful.

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