VP, Product Management - Core Lending

Kapitus provides small business financing through direct lending and a network of lending partners. The Vice President, Product Management - Core Lending serves as the general manager for core lending products, owning product P&L, strategy, go-to-market plans, and outcomes while leading product managers and partnering across the organization.

Responsibilities:

• Own and manage the revenue and cost drivers for core lending products, tracking key performance metrics regularly to understand what moves them, and make product decisions that improve them while managing the unit economics of each product to make trade-offs accordingly. Present business performance to executive leadership monthly and drive to prioritization decisions
• Identify and quantify the gap between current performance and competitive benchmarks and build the case for investments that close those gaps
• Partner with Finance to build and maintain a product-level P&L model that connects roadmap decisions to financial outcomes
• Define the go-to-market strategy across segments and channels and own the positioning narrative, ensuring it is reflected consistently across the application flow, marketing materials, and partner communications
• Own the product pricing strategy in partnership with Risk and Finance, making recommendations on rate structures, fee design, and promotional offers grounded in competitive analysis and borrower behavior data
• Lead the launch planning for new product features, underwriting enhancements, and market expansions by defining the launch objectives, coordinate across Sales, Marketing, Operations, and Compliance, and measure outcomes against pre-defined success metrics
• Develop and maintain a competitive intelligence cadence: quarterly analysis of competitor pricing, product features, underwriting criteria, and GTM approaches from key competitors and other relevant players. Translate competitive findings into specific product recommendations
• Define a rolling 12–18 month product vision for Line of Credit and Term Loan grounded in market opportunity, borrower need, competitive positioning, and Kapitus' strategic objectives. Present this vision to executive leadership at least quarterly and update it in response to market signals
• Translate the product vision into a prioritized roadmap of initiatives in partnership with Product Delivery and work closely with Delivery leadership to ensure requirements accurately reflect business outcomes desired
• Identify opportunities to use AI and machine learning to improve product outcomes, such as faster decisioning, better underwriting accuracy, personalized offer design, and automated borrower communication
• Ensure the product roadmap reflects regulatory and compliance requirements, proactively engaging Legal and Compliance on initiatives that touch borrower data, underwriting logic, adverse action reasoning, etc
• Directly lead a team of PMs supporting the core lending products, owning their development, performance and growth as well as their domain expertise in small business lending
• Model the product behaviors you expect of your team: outcome-driven thinking, data-grounded prioritization, proactive stakeholder communication and disciplined business case development
• Hire and develop product talent that combines business acumen with technical fluency and customer empathy.Inspire and create a motivating environment through coaching, mentoring, and enablement
• Provide opportunities to participate in both formal and informal developmental activities
• Working with senior leaders and department head, set expectations for all team members and hold employees accountable for results
• Lead hiring, performance management, and compensation, and evaluation of team members
• Collaborate with Kapitus leadership and HR to continually refine and modify career growth and succession plans to meet changing business needs

Requirements:

• 8–12+ years in Product Management with demonstrated ownership of full product P&L in a fintech, banking, or lending environment. Experience leading multi-product portfolios at the Director or VP level is required
• Proven track record of owning and improving financial metrics, such as approval rate, conversion rate, renewal rate, LTV, cost per acquisition and ability to build and defend financial business cases
• Deep understanding of small business or consumer lending economics, including how underwriting decisions affect portfolio performance, how pricing interacts with approval rate and default rate, how renewal rates compound into LTV, etc
• Experience owning a go-to-market strategy with success measurements for a financial product, including pricing decisions, channel strategy, launch planning, competitive positioning
• Experience operating in a regulated financial services environment, familiarity with UDAAP, fair lending, adverse action notification, and CFPB guidelines as they apply to small business lending
• Experience working within or alongside an Agile Product Delivery organization with solid understanding of the Product Owner / Product Manager distinction and ability to partner on roadmap development and execution
• Ability to present product strategies, competitive analyses and business cases to executive leadership with confidence and clarity and in a way that generates clear decisions
• Demonstrated ability to lead and develop a team of PMs with varying experience levels as well as partner and influence cross functional partners without direct authority
• Consideration will be given to qualified remote candidates residing in states where Kapitus and/or one of its subsidiaries has an established physical presence