Platform Product Director

Position Overview

Zelis Payments is seeking a visionary, engaging, and results-oriented Platform Product Director to join our dynamic team building and modernizing a set of dynamic, distributed technology platforms powering the growth of a $1Bn+ payments business. The selected candidate will be responsible for leading the product strategy for our platform and data services including developing roadmaps that align and enable new product initiatives to be built quickly, introduce emerging cloud-native platform services in modernizing current platforms, and work closely across the platform engineering group, product engineering, product management, and operations teams to ensure execution and delivery of critical initiatives to scale the Zelis Advanced Payment Platform (ZAPP).   
 
This key role will collaborate with cross functional teams (product management, operations, platform engineering teams, divisional counterparts) to optimize the experience for both internal and external end users, tailored by role and permissions, to ensure a seamless Zelis experience. 

What You’ll Do

• Product Strategy and Vision: Develop and articulate a clear product vision and strategy for platform services that align with customer needs, product management priorities, and Zelis Payments’ growth strategy.

• Platform Mindset: Drive a Platform-as-a-Product mindset and evolutionary changes to our platform (API-first platform design, batch to real-time data processing, decoupled services over monolithic applications) with vision, strategy, backlog planning, communication and collaboration across platform engineering, operations, and product management.  

• Delivery Management: Collaborate and work closely with cross-functional teams (product management, operations, and engineering teams) to drive Agile execution and delivery of Product and Platform visions. Oversee the entire product lifecycle, from ideation and development to launch and post-launch support, ensuring alignment with business goals and customer needs. Manage multiple product releases simultaneously, managing dependencies, maintaining aggressive release schedules and ensuring timely delivery. 

• Developer Experience: Define and drive a strategy to enable product developers, clients, and partners with documentation and self-service tools to integrate with and leverage a range of platform services related to payments and communications processing.

• Partnership and Collaboration: Collaborate with key stakeholders, including executives, customers, and partners, to gather requirements, prioritize features, and align platform goals with product and business objectives. 

• Be Data Curious: Utilize data analytics and user feedback to inform product decisions, improve platform features and services, and optimize the developer experience. 

• Innovation: Drive technology enablement initiatives, integrating new technologies and frameworks into roadmaps, and supporting a balance of experimentation with well-defined solutions. 

• Continuous Improvement: Champion continuous improvement initiatives, leveraging industry best practices and emerging technologies to enhance product quality and delivery efficiency. 

• Communication: Translate complex technical concepts into clear, non-technical language for executive presentations and stakeholder communications, utilizing advanced PowerPoint skills. 

What You’ll Bring to Zelis

• Education: Bachelor’s degree in Business, Engineering, Computer Science or a related field. MBA is a plus.

• Industry Experience: 7+ years of experience as a Product or Delivery Manager with expertise in software platform development, APIs, SDKs and frameworks, and high-volume transaction processing. Experience in financial services or with payments platforms are a plus.

• Technical Skills: Agile project and portfolio management experience with proven success managing development lifecycle from ideation through post-launch support, business and technical analysis including requirements definition and Agile backlog management, strategic thinker who can balance short-term delivery with long-term platform innovation, ability to lead engineering discussions around technology decisions and strategy, ability to understand the platform capabilities needed by developers to create new and evolving solutions and collaborate with engineering to define solutions. 

• Leadership: Demonstrated leadership abilities with experience managing technical product managers, experience guiding cross-functional engineering teams, managing complex software projects, and building roadmaps to drive alignment and prioritization of goals. Experience working with distributed and offshore teams.

• Communication: Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to convey complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders. Proven success defining and communicating goals and objectives and driving alignment within teams and with stakeholders.

• Problem-Solving and Continuous Improvement: Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with a proactive approach to identifying and addressing challenges. Continuous inspection and adapting to optimize product, platform, and project delivery methods.