Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. 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
Skills
- 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
Benefits
- 10% annual bonus potential
- Bonuses, commissions, or equity
- Comprehensive health coverage (medical, dental, vision, prescriptions, life & disability)
- Flexible PTO, 11 company holidays, and generous parental and caregiver leave
- An immediately vested 401(k) with company contributions
- Wellness resources and professional development opportunities
Company Overview
Kinective is a software platform that offers financial document generation, digital banking, and real-time analytics for the banking sector. It was founded in 2023, and is headquartered in Gilbert, Arizona, USA, with a workforce of 501-1000 employees. Its website is https://www.kinective.io.