Principal Product Manager

Job Type

Full-time

Description

Lead the Way to Intelligent Banking with Us!

You might not think about what happens behind the scenes when you check your bank balance or deposit a check from your phone, but we do. Every day.

Kinective empowers banks and credit unions to move beyond keeping up with technology to shaping the future of banking. Our platform seamlessly connects the right tools, delivers real-time data, and drives smarter operations for more than 4,000 financial institutions nationwide. We are a fast-growing team built on individual ownership, company-wide collaboration, and setting industry-leading standards. Here, new ideas are encouraged, candid feedback is welcomed, and your growth truly matters as much as the company’s. At Kinective, we are leading the way to intelligent banking together and enjoying the journey along the way.

Why This Role Matters

Every product decision at Kinective touches a community bank or credit union — real institutions with real constraints, real regulators, and real members depending on them. This role exists to make sure we never lose sight of that.

The Principal Product Manager of our FI Solutions & Platform Strategy is one of the most important bridges between the financial institutions we serve and the product teams building for them. You bring the credibility, judgment, and operational fluency of someone who has lived inside the FI world — and you use it to inform and sharpen the product and platform decisions we make.

This role sits at the intersection of client reality and product strategy. You will help validate what we build, strengthen how we position it, and ensure the product organization has the ground-truth FI insight it needs to make better decisions — alongside the SVPs of Product Strategy and Product Marketing who depend on that input.

What You’ll Own

FI Engagement & Client Validation

• 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

Cross-Product Platform Strategy

• 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

AI Solution Strategy & Validation

• 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 sig…