Principle Product Manager

Kinective is a company that empowers banks and credit unions to shape the future of banking through their innovative platform. The Principal Product Manager will serve as a vital link between financial institutions and product teams, ensuring that product decisions are informed by real-world insights from clients. This role involves client engagement, cross-product platform strategy, AI solution validation, and aligning go-to-market efforts with stakeholder needs.

Responsibilities:

• Act as primary source of ground-truth FI insight — ensuring what we build is grounded in how financial institutions actually operate
• Play a major, ongoing role in Kinective’s client advisory programs — including the Customer Advisory Board (CAB), executive committee sessions, and client working groups — in close partnership with the Director of Product Marketing who leads these programs
• Validate major solution initiatives against real FI feedback before launch, ensuring the roadmap reflects what community banks and credit unions actually need
• Translate client conversations into clear, actionable insights the product team can act on — and flag gaps between what we’re building and what FIs will actually adopt
• Build and maintain direct relationships with FI executives, operations leaders, and technology teams to give Kinective ongoing access to operational ground truth
• Equip the SVPs of Product Strategy and Product Marketing with the FI insight and context they need to make roadmap, positioning, and go-to-market decisions
• Contribute to Kinective’s cross-product platform strategy by bringing a client-grounded perspective to how our solutions connect and deliver value together
• Contribute to the cross-product roadmap by surfacing integration friction, workflow gaps, and multi-product opportunities identified through direct FI engagement
• Map end-to-end FI workflows — from digital onboarding to core ledger posting to fraud decisioning — and identify where module handoffs break down for clients
• Serve as connective tissue between product teams, engineering, and professional services to help prioritize integration improvements that benefit the full platform
• Pressure-test product and roadmap decisions against real FI operations: how institutions are staffed, how decisions get made, what regulatory compliance looks like in practice
• Ensure our AI investments are grounded in how FIs can actually adopt and benefit from them
• Partner with Product Strategy leadership to validate Kinective’s AI-powered solution bundles against real FI workflows, constraints, and adoption readiness
• Help FI clients articulate the value of AI-first banking in terms they can present to their own boards — and feed those conversations back as product insight
• Identify where AI adoption pressure, data fragmentation, and lean FI teams create the highest-value opportunities for Kinective’s platform to differentiate
• Surface market intelligence on AI adoption trends, regulatory signals, and fintech disruption to inform the product roadmap
• Bridge client reality and internal execution — helping product, marketing, and sales speak credibly to FI buyers
• Partner with Product Marketing to ensure value propositions and messaging are framed around outcomes that FI executives recognize and care about
• Review sales and marketing materials to ensure they reflect how FIs actually think about their problems — and flag when positioning misses the mark
• Serve as a subject matter resource for sales on complex FI deals, helping navigate procurement dynamics and stakeholder structures
• Align product, engineering, professional services, and GTM teams around client-validated priorities — without direct authority over any of them

Requirements:

• VP-level or equivalent experience at a community bank, credit union, or regional financial institution
• Broad exposure across FI functions: operations, technology, lending, retail banking, fraud, or compliance
• Hands-on experience managing core migrations, middleware implementations, or origination system overhauls
• Deep familiarity with the challenges facing community FIs today: data fragmentation, AI adoption pressure, consolidation dynamics, fraud escalation, and doing more with leaner teams
• Existing relationships within the community FI ecosystem — with peers, vendors, or industry associations
• 5+ years in software product management, specifically managing complex platform ecosystems, integrations, or API-driven products in fintech or enterprise SaaS
• Proven experience working across fragmented product lines to create platform coherence
• Direct, hands-on experience working with community FI clients
• Understanding of the difference between how FIs are sold to and how they actually make decisions internally
• Systems thinking: ability to see how a change in one module ripples across an entire FI's operation
• Technical fluency: comfortable discussing APIs, data schemas, and integration architecture with engineers
• Influence without authority: ability to navigate complex organizations to drive alignment across competing priorities
• Communication clarity: ability to translate complex FI operations into crisp product direction
• Comfort with ambiguity: ability to define what success looks like in a senior IC role