Product Manager

Technology | Business Purpose Lending

Position Summary

The Product Manager translates business priorities into a clear, actionable product backlog for Redwood Trust's Business Purpose Lending technology portfolio. The role owns product requirements from discovery through release, aligns business and technology teams on intended outcomes, and confirms that delivered capabilities solve the underlying business need.

This position works closely with lending operations, originations, underwriting, closing, asset management, capital markets, accounting, technology, data, quality assurance, and external delivery partners. The Product Manager is accountable for backlog quality, priority decisions, acceptance criteria, stakeholder readiness, and product adoption across platforms that may include Salesforce, enterprise data services, integrations, document generation, pricing, portals, and finance systems.

Primary Responsibilities

• Own and maintain a prioritized product backlog that reflects business value, operational risk, regulatory requirements, dependencies, and available delivery capacity.
• Lead discovery with business stakeholders to define the problem, affected users, current process, desired outcome, scope, assumptions, constraints, and measurable success criteria.
• Write clear epics, features, user stories, acceptance criteria, process flows, and supporting requirements that developers and quality assurance analysts can execute without avoidable rework.
• Make day-to-day scope and priority decisions within the approved roadmap, and escalate decisions that affect funding, controls, policy, staffing, or committed delivery dates.
• Partner with solution architects, developers, administrators, data engineers, integration teams, and vendors to evaluate options and confirm that proposed designs meet business and control requirements.
• Plan releases with project and engineering leads by sequencing work, identifying dependencies, confirming readiness criteria, and communicating impacts to affected teams.
• Review completed work throughout the sprint, answer questions promptly, accept or reject stories against agreed criteria, and prevent incomplete work from moving forward.
• Coordinate business testing by identifying testers, preparing scenarios and expected results, tracking defects, collecting evidence, and obtaining documented approval before production release.
• Monitor product performance after release using defects, adoption, cycle time, user feedback, data quality, control performance, and other relevant measures; convert findings into backlog decisions.
• Maintain product documentation, decision history, release notes, process changes, training needs, and traceability from business request through deployed outcome.
• Support incident and production issue triage by clarifying business impact, helping establish priority, validating corrective action, and communicating status to stakeholders.
• Facilitate backlog refinement, sprint planning, demonstrations, stakeholder reviews, and other product forums with clear decisions, owners, and follow-up actions.
• Manage vendor-delivered product work by confirming requirements, reviewing deliverables, tracking commitments, and escalating performance or dependency concerns.
• Promote consistent product and delivery standards across teams, including clear definitions of ready and done, practical acceptance criteria, and disciplined change control.

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Product Ownership Expectations

Accountability

Expected Practice

Business value

Connect each priority to a defined business, customer, risk, compliance, or operational outcome.

Backlog readiness

Keep near-term work sufficiently refined, estimated, sequenced, and supported by testable acceptance criteria.

Decision speed

Resolve routine product questions quickly and bring material tradeoffs to the correct decision-makers with a recommendation.

Delivery quality

Confirm that releases meet agreed requirements, controls, data standards, and user needs before acceptance.

Transparency

Provide concise reporting on scope, progress, risks, dependencies, decisions, and expected delivery dates.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent combination of education and relevant professional experience.
• Five or more years of experience in product ownership, business analysis, technology delivery, or a closely related role.
• Demonstrated experience owning a backlog and translating business processes into clear, testable requirements and acceptance criteria.
• Experience working with Agile delivery teams through discovery, refinement, development, testing, release, and post-production support.
• Strong facilitation and communication skills, including the ability to explain complex issues, document decisions, and align stakeholders with competing priorities.
• Working knowledge of system integrations, data flows, reporting, access controls, testing practices, and production change management.
• Ability to analyze operational problems, distinguish symptoms from root causes, and recommend practical solutions supported by evidence.
• Ability to manage several workstreams, make timely decisions, and maintain accurate product documentation in a regulated environment.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with mortgage banking, business purpose lending, specialty finance, financial services, or another regulated industry.
• Hands-on experience with Salesforce or another enterprise CRM platform, including workflows, permissions, integrations, reporting, and release processes.
• Experience with Jira and Confluence, product roadmaps, API-enabled products, data platforms, document generation, pricing engines, portals, or finance-system integrations.
• Product Owner, Scrum, Agile, Salesforce, or business analysis certification.
• Experience coordinating internal teams and third-party implementation partners across multiple locations and time zones.

Core Competencies

Competency

What It Looks Like

Product judgment

Balances business value, user impact, risk, effort, and technical constraints when setting priorities.

Ownership

Takes responsibility for decisions, follow-through, and the quality of information provided to the delivery team.

Communication

Writes clearly, facilitates productive discussions, and adapts detail to business, technical, and executive audiences.

Collaboration

Builds effective working relationships across functions while preserving clear accountability for decisions.

Analytical thinking

Uses process evidence, data, defects, and user feedback to define problems and assess outcomes.

Control awareness

Incorporates security, privacy, audit, compliance, and separation-of-duties requirements into product work.