Product Manager

The Role:

We are seeking an experienced technical product manager to join our team and oversee our new API (application programming interfaces) management platform. This platform is a crucial access point for global business payment services, catering to large corporations, banks, and financial institutions. With Bottomline's worldwide API offerings, we aim to enhance our customers’ operations, streamline their processes, and boost business performance. This position requires a deep understanding of API design principles, industry best practices, and emerging technologies to drive innovation and maximise the value of the API ecosystem. 

As a Product Manager (PM), you will collaborate closely with senior product management colleagues and highly technical agile development teams to support the strategic vision. You will oversee the API management platform's planning initiatives, implementation, evolution, and maintenance. This will involve gathering and prioritising product and customer requirements, leading and collaborating with multiple scrum teams and managing stakeholder expectations. You will lead a team to deliver API capabilities to customers and product line teams by managing the release backlog and working with the scrum team, technical lead, and architectural lead to define stories, use cases, and requirements. You will be expected to understand the dynamics of a public cloud-ready SaaS (software as a service) solution and the value of incremental delivery within a CI/CD pipeline. 

How you will contribute 

• Collaborate with stakeholders to establish the priorities for the API management platforms’ roadmap, ensuring the platform’s effective implementation, rollout, and adoption across the portfolio. 

• Ensure that the platform complies with functional, non-functional, and technical standards and requirements that are aligned with business objectives and market demands and that it delivers value to the business through adoption, performance, and reliability. 

• Maintain a prioritised backlog for the API management platform team. Work closely with the technical and architect domain leads to ensure the API management platform's scalability, security, and reusability. 

• Ensure that epics and user stories are “developer-ready” and take ownership of the accuracy and quality of stories, use cases, and specifications. 

• As the primary subject matter expert, you will facilitate communication between business stakeholders and technical teams, providing a knowledgeable resource for their questions and issues. 

• Collaborate with internal teams overseeing cross-team dependencies and alignment with teams such as DevOps, product and development, support, IT, and operations. 

• Communicate API management platform strategy, roadmap, and progress updates to stakeholders and scrum teams, and manage change effectively. 

• Collaborate with the scrum team to prioritise the delivery of value within the team’s sprint capacity, as indicated by velocity, and expedite the acceptance of work that meets defined definitions of done. 

• Support the establishment of key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics to measure the platform's success. 

• Coordinate the tiering assessment for retrofitting legacy APIs to the API management platform and align stakeholders for the evolution of legacy APIs. 

• Support product lines in identifying API monetization and expansion opportunities and enabling this endeavour. 

• Communicate new features and functionality to teams, which may involve providing training sessions, internal overviews, FAQs (frequently asked questions), and other process support documentation as needed for enablement. 

• Stay current with industry trends and regulatory changes related to API platform management and integration technologies. 

Attributes, skills, and experience 

Required 

• 5+ years of product ownership/management experience.  

• 3+ years of demonstrable knowledge of SDLC and product lifecycle management in an Agile CI/CD environment. 

• In-depth understanding of API management concepts and processes. 

• An understanding of product design methodologies such as user research and usability testing. 

• Training in analytical processes such as story creation, use case definitions and interview techniques. 

• Ability to quickly understand complex business requirements and technical products. 

• Strong understanding of security principles, practices, and technologies. 

• Knowledge and experience in the use of JIRA. 

• Demonstrable success in a fast-paced, matrixed environment. 

• Ability to lead a team and execute with outstanding interpersonal skills and formidable team player. 

• Excellent written communication skills.  

• Strong problem-solving skills. 

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, business or a related field or equivalent experience.