JOB DESCRIPTION

Location Requirement

This position is open only to candidates who can work in one of the following approved locations:

Los Angeles, CA (West LA); San Francisco, CA (SoMa); San Diego, CA; or Tampa, FL (Westshore District)

Job Description

Principal Product Manager

Job Summary

The Principal Product Solutions Manager leads the intake, discovery, and solutioning of Green Dot's partner payments products and services, while driving broader product strategy and lifecycle execution for the Payments Platform. This role plays a critical part in ensuring work is fully defined, technically feasible, and operationally ready before entering Product execution and delivery. It focuses on the front end of the product lifecycle (Intake through Discovery and Pre-Commit readiness), improving the quality, consistency, and completeness of inputs that drive successful delivery.

In addition, this role partners closely with Product leadership to shape and define product strategy, set requirements, and ensure alignment to customer, partner, and business objectives across the product lifecycle. The Product Solutions Lead partners cross-functionally across Product, Engineering, Operations, Compliance/Risk, and Business stakeholders to coordinate early-stage shaping activities, validate dependencies and risks, and ensure readiness for Product prioritization and commitment. The Principal Product Solutions Manager is accountable for ensuring that work entering Product planning is complete, connected, actionable, and aligned to overall product strategy.

Key Responsibilities

Lifecycle Readiness & Input Completeness
• Own readiness and completeness of work across Intake, Discovery, and Pre-Commit stages
• Ensure all required inputs are defined, connected, and consistent before Product Delivery engagement

Validate that work meets the criteria for "ready for Product" including:
• Clear requirements
• Defined dependencies and risks
• Technical feasibility
• Sufficient business context for prioritization

Intake & Discovery Coordination

Drive continuity across early lifecycle milestones including:
• Intake questionnaire completion and classification
• Customer and regulatory impact identification
• High-level requirements definition and shaping
• Initial sizing and feasibility assessment
• Preliminary business case development
• Coordinate across Product, Engineering, Compliance/Risk, Operations, and Business teams to ensure inputs are complete and aligned

Technical Translation & Feasibility Validation
• Partner with Engineering to validate feasibility early and reduce rework downstream
• Structure inputs to enable targeted, efficient engineering engagement
• Ensure dependencies, constraints, and risks are identified and documented before commitment

Cross-Functional Coordination

Serve as the central coordinator across:
• Product (requirements shaping and prioritization readiness)
• Engineering (feasibility, sizing, dependencies)
• Compliance/Risk and Operations (impact and operational readiness)
• Business stakeholders (context and value articulation)
• Ensure clear ownership and accountability at each lifecycle milestone and handoff

Product Enablement
• Reduce Product Delivery teams' upstream workload by owning early shaping and readiness activities
• Provide Product Delivery teams with "commit-ready" inputs to support prioritization and sequencing
• Maintain continuity of context through early delivery as needed

Product Management & Strategy
• Define and drive the product strategy for the Payments Platform, ensuring alignment to customer needs, partner requirements, and business objectives
• Define, refine, and prioritize business and technical requirements in partnership with Product Managers, Engineering, and stakeholders
• Drive product roadmap development by identifying and prioritizing opportunities to improve capability, performance, scalability, and resiliency
• Partner with stakeholders to define product objectives for new features and enhancements, leveraging customer insights, partner feedback, and market trends
• Define and document customer journeys, user experience considerations, operational workflows, and risk controls
• Own the definition and tracking of product success metrics and KPIs to measure feature and product performance
• Serve as the subject matter expert for payments capabilities, including APIs, business rules, and associated risk/compliance requirements
• Support issue triage and resolution by ensuring clear ownership, requirements clarity, and alignment across teams
• Ensure adherence to IT governance standards, processes, and approved tools throughout the product lifecycle

Required Qualifications
• 10+ years of experience working across the product development lifecycle in a product, technical, or program capacity
• Experience owning product strategy, requirements definition, and delivery for technical products or platforms
• Strong ability to translate business needs into structured technical and product requirements
• Experience coordinating cross-functional teams (Product, Engineering, Operations, Compliance/Risk)
• Proficiency in requirements definition, feasibility analysis, and dependency mapping
• Strong analytical, organizational, and communication skills
• Demonstrated ability to influence senior leadership and drive alignment on complex, ambiguous problems spanning multiple teams
• Sufficient technical acumen to engage in architecture and design discussions with engineering teams

Preferred Qualifications
• Experience working in fintech, payments, or regulated environments
• Prior experience working on partner platforms or embedded finance products
• Working knowledge of consumer or B2B fintech products and services
• Familiarity with API-based architectures and microservices
• Experience with payments ecosystems (ACH, debit rails, real-time payments preferred)

Key Competencies
• Structured thinking and problem decomposition
• Cross-functional influence without direct authority
• Mentors product practitioners and raises the standard of product craft across the organization
• Mentors and raises the bar for less experienced product practitioners
• Ability to balance strategic thinking with execution detail
• Detail orientation with an ability to connect end-to-end workflows
• Strong communication and alignment across technical and non-technical teams
• Bias toward completeness, clarity, and execution readiness

**Ability to work in the U.S. without sponsorship**
**Ability to meet the location requirement outlined above**

POSITION TYPE

Regular

PAY RANGE
The targeted base salary for this position is $138,800 to $208,100 per year. The final compensation will be determined by a number of factors such as qualifications, expertise, and the candidate's geographical location.