Product Manager

Product Manager / Senior Product Manager, Underwriting & LeadGen Capabilities

Hive Financial Systems  ·  In office at Atlanta, GA (Buckhead)  ·  Individual Contributor  ·  Mid to Senior

About the Role

Hive Financial Systems creates the software that lenders use for Loan Management. Our Underwriting and Lead Gen teams are the heartbeat of providing capabilities to find customers and determine who to provide loans. This role owns the systems, processes, and capabilities that execute that policy: the decision engine, the verification workflow, lead decisioning, scoring integration, and the contracts that carry a decision downstream.

We are hiring a Product Manager or Senior Product Manager to own these capabilities from problem discovery through adoption. You will define what to build and why, and you will be accountable for the quality of acceptance criteria, the health of your backlog, and whether what ships gets used.

You will report directly to the Product and Technology Leader. That is deliberate — there are no intermediate layers between you and the decisions, which means faster context, faster feedback, and a steeper growth curve than a comparable role inside a deeper organization.

What You Will Own

Acceptance Criteria as the key to Quality. Every acceptance criteria you create is written as Given/When/Then acceptance criteria before any downstream work begins — precise, testable, and unambiguous, covering negative, functional, technical, and test considerations. QA writes automated tests directly from your acceptance criteria which truly determines the quality of our work.

Backlog Health and Work Breakdown. You maintain a groomed backlog with 40 to 60 percent of the next sprint's stories ready, break work into increments of fourteen days or less even in unfamiliar areas of the product, and ensure every story sits under an epic with a measurable goal. You drive story-mapping and journey-mapping sessions and give your teams a forward-looking pipeline so they always know what is next and why.

Roadmap and Technical Flow. You develop and maintain the roadmap for your area and publish it where the whole team can see it. You understand the technical operational flow end to end — you can explain where a decision physically travels, which external interfaces it depends on, and what breaks when one of them is slow or unavailable.

Measurement. You instrument for effectiveness, efficiency, flow, and product health, and you capture a baseline before launch rather than reconstructing one afterward. Analytics are part of the definition of done, not a follow-up story.

Value and ROI Discipline. You begin with the end in mind: every piece of work carries a measurable outcome before it starts, and you challenge the value of work items so the team spends its capacity on the highest-ROI initiatives. You are as willing to kill, defer, or shrink work as you are to start it, and you can name what you chose not to build and why. Non-value-adding work is a defect you are accountable for catching. You do this at the story and epic level today, and you grow into investment-level measurement as your scope expands.

Voice to Value. You can trace a need from the moment it is voiced to the moment value is realized.

Launch Support. You contribute to operational readiness and rollout; preparing internal teams, supporting feature-flagged releases, and gathering the adoption signal that tells us whether the capability landed.

Stakeholder Communication and Transparency. You surface status, risk, and results proactively rather than on request. You communicate decisions through demonstrations, documentation, and information radiators, you lead with the headline, and when something is off track you bring the problem together with a recommended path forward.

Decisioning and Verification Capabilities. You own the systems that turn an application into an approve, decline, or conditional outcome: how model scores and rules are combined and configured, how stipulation sets and decline reasons are expressed and maintained, how instant bank verification is normalized into one decisioning-ready shape regardless of vendor format, and when an outcome auto-executes versus routes to manual review. Underwriting owns the credit policy; you own the capability that enforces it faithfully, auditable, and per portfolio.

Lead Decisioning, Scoring, and Resale Capabilities. You own the systems behind approve, decline, and resell decisions, pre-approval, and re-application eligibility, including the cooling-off and per-state limits expressed as versioned configuration. You author the Given/When/Then requirements the scoring service and its vendor waterfall must satisfy — including how decisioning degrades when a score is stale or unavailable — and you own the routing, mapping, and attribution capabilities behind leads Hive does not fund itself.

Compliance as a Second Risk Model. Every decline carries an adverse-action reason traceable to the inputs that produced it. Fair-lending exposure in models, rules, and derived features is tested before deployment, not after. Consent, disclosure, and state-level constraints are requirements you write, and every decision path remains replayable from an immutable audit trail.

Your Growth Path. You will step into operational readiness, go-to-market, and product-marketing ownership within your first six to twelve months. We will tell you which band we are hiring you into and exactly what closes the gap to the next one.

What We Look For

Structured Discovery and Approach to New Ideas. You have a repeatable way of moving from ambiguity to conviction, and you can walk us through one: how you framed the problem, what you gathered before presenting options, and how you knew when to stop exploring and start committing. If you have not evaluated a brand-new product idea end to end, tell us how you would approach it.

Work Breakdown and Team Craft. You can decompose a large, unfamiliar effort into deliverable slices alongside engineering and QA. You have a considered point of view on delivery methods — Scrum, Kanban, XP — and can explain which fits which situation rather than defending one. You know what cadence of touchpoints leadership actually needs, and why.

Judgment and Escalation. You know which decisions need outside discussion and which are simply yours to make — and when you are unsure, you ask rather than guess.

Decision Quality over Volume. You measure approval accuracy, verification pass-through, early default, cost per performing loan, and cohort economics — not approval rate, decision latency, or raw funded volume. Ideally you have caught a metric that looked good and was hiding adverse selection.

Data and Model Literacy. You are comfortable owning a capability with a model in the loop: model versioning, drift, champion and challenger comparison, and the difference between a model that ranks well and one that is calibrated. You can read a vintage curve and a roll rate and say what they mean for the roadmap.

AI Fluency. You use AI tools in your daily product work — discovery, analysis, specification, prototyping — in ways that have changed how you operate, and you have a view on what becomes more and less important as those capabilities expand.

Ownership and Accountability. You own outcomes, not activities. You meet commitments without being chased, and when you find a problem you bring options rather than only the observation.  You understand you don’t make commitments unless you are positive you can deliver.  We rather you say your can’t commit, then commit and miss.

Communication Discipline. Concise in meetings, precise in writing, and tailored to the audience — technical depth for engineering, business and loss impact for leadership, borrower outcomes for design. You do not bury the point.

Breadth and Curiosity. You actively grow knowledge outside your core area, understand how your capabilities fit the broader business and where it is headed over the next three years, know the critical external interfaces your systems depend on, and will pair with an engineer or QA analyst to learn how something actually works.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree and 4 years' experience in a related field, or 8 years' experience in a related field in lieu of a degree
• 3+ years in product management
• Demonstrated experience writing testable acceptance criteria that engineering and QA build directly against
• Demonstrated ownership of discovery from problem identification through validated solution direction
• Experience with API or event contracts as products, and with capability products whose consumers are other products and teams
• Fluency with modern agile delivery in a multi-team environment
• Strong written and verbal communication; can precisely articulate a problem, the tradeoff, and the recommendation
• Proficiency with AI tools integrated into product workflows

Preferred

• Understand and know Commercial and Technical Product Management as well as the differences
• Experience in a regulated domain — consumer lending, payments, banking, insurance, or credit and risk
• Consumer lending experience — decisioning, underwriting policy, bank-data or income verification, bureau data, or adverse action
• Lead generation, performance marketing, or lead-marketplace experience
• Capabilities with machine learning in the decision path, and familiarity with model-risk governance
• Multi-tenant, configuration-driven platform experience where tenant differences are configuration rather than code
• Jira and Confluence used in an outcome-traceable story-to-epic-to-initiative structure