Data Product Lead

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Kapitus is building a next-generation enterprise data and AI capability that replaces hundreds of legacy analytics workflows with governed, reusable business data products — moving the organization from producing reports to producing decisions.

As a Data Product Lead, you own data products through their full life cycle — from business problem and value hypothesis, through business case, build, launch, adoption, and usage reporting, to retirement of products and the legacy reports they replace. You are the bridge between business requirements, data engineering, governance, and customer-facing teams, and you manage products against outcomes business leaders recognize, not technical output.

This is a product-discipline role, not a hands-on engineering role. You must understand our architecture well enough to link requirements to it and hold credible conversations with engineers. Experience in our business vertical is required, not preferred: you will not be learning the language of lending on the job. AI fluency is an advantage, not a requirement.

What You Will Do:

Own the Data Product Life Cycle End to End

• Identify business problems worth solving with data; clarify each product's value proposition — utility, decision enabler, or driver of new business value — and quantify expected impact before anything is built.
• Define outcome-driven metrics that link each product to business goals (revenue growth, cost, risk, customer experience), alongside standardized product KPIs — adoption, usage, quality, service levels, cost-to-serve — maintained in a metrics dictionary with agreed formulas and owners; avoid vanity metrics that measure activity instead of value.
• Own usage reporting and portfolio transparency: scorecards, value stories co-created with stakeholders, and regular reviews informing invest, pivot, or retire decisions.

Gather Requirements and Shape What Gets Built

• Own retirement: sunset policies, end-of-life roadmaps, and structured decommissioning for products — and legacy workflows — that fail to sustain business value.
• Elicit requirements through stakeholder interviews, focus groups, and customer journey mapping; translate vague, ill-defined needs into well-defined, testable product requirements with clear acceptance criteria.
• Turn requirements into product definitions engineering can build: named owners, defined consumers, data contracts, certified semantic definitions, quality thresholds, and service levels.
• Link every requirement to our platform architecture — layered data foundation, governed core entities, certified semantics, and serving channels (BI, APIs, ML, AI) — so products are built on the platform, not beside it.
• Champion prototyping and iteration: confirm value with consumers at every development stage rather than specifying once and walking away.

Be the Liaison Between Business, Customers, and Engineering

• Serve as the connective tissue between business requirements, data engineering, governance, and customer-facing teams, translating in both directions so needs and delivery stay aligned.
• Engage business and technical stakeholders to communicate progress, surface trade-offs, and present recommendations clearly to technical, non-technical, and customer audiences.
• Serve as the primary coordination point between U.S. and India-based teams, ensuring alignment on priorities, requirements, handoffs, and delivery timelines.
• Partner with Data Engineering on backlog priorities and sequencing, and with Data Governance on definitions, standards, quality, lineage, and appropriate usage — in an Agile/Scrum environment.

What We’re Looking For:

• 5+ years in data product management, product ownership, or customer-facing data & analytics roles in a data-intensive environment.
• Bachelor's degree in Business, Analytics, Computer Science, Information Systems, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Business vertical experience — required. 3+ of those years working with data in small business lending, commercial or consumer credit, merchant financing, payments, or closely adjacent financial services. You already speak the language of the business — originations and funnel conversion, underwriting and credit policy, pricing and risk tiers, funding, servicing, delinquency and collections, renewals, and portfolio performance — and can engage business partners as a peer from day one. We will not be teaching the vertical.
• Command of the data product management discipline — the difference between running a product and running a project; value propositions and value hypotheses; business cases; stage-gated life cycle management from ideation through build, launch, operation, scaling, and retirement.
• Outcome orientation — you measure products by business outcomes, not technical output: defining outcome-driven metrics with stakeholders, tracking product KPIs (adoption, usage, quality, service levels, cost-to-serve), producing usage reporting and portfolio scorecards, and telling credible value stories.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management — the defining skill of this role. You can run a requirements workshop in the morning, present to executives or customers in the afternoon, and write specifications both audiences trust.
• A portfolio of real product artifacts — you have personally authored the working documents of this discipline: product one-pagers and business cases with quantified ROI, PRDs with acceptance criteria, data contract and semantic specifications, metric dictionaries with agreed formulas and owners, adoption and usage dashboards, and sunset/retirement plans. Expect to walk us through examples you wrote.
• Requirements-to-build capability — proven ability to gather, structure, and prioritize business requirements into PRDs and buildable product specifications, validated with consumers at each stage.
• Architecture literacy, not hands-on engineering — you understand modern data platform concepts (cloud warehouse, layered architecture, data contracts, semantic definitions, BI and API serving) well enough to link requirements to our architecture and converse credibly with engineers on Snowflake, dbt, Tableau, and AWS — without building it yourself.
• Cross-functional, cross-geography delivery experience — Agile/Scrum, distributed teams, strong attention to detail, and excellent project management.
• The hiring bar: a data product manager in the full sense of the discipline, already fluent in out business vertical. Someone who owns products from value hypothesis through adoption, usage reporting, and retirement, linkes requirements to our architecture, and can show the artifacts to prove it. Product depth and domain fluency are required; hands-on technology skills are not.

Additional Skills:
Advisory, research, or consulting background experience at an industry research/advisory firm (Gartner-style), a consultancy, or in a client-facing analytics role where explaining data concepts to executives was the job.
Product or data management credentials such as CSPO/PSPO, Pragmatic Institute, SAFe PO/PM, or a data management certification such as CDMP
AI and GenAI awareness. You have a familiarity with how AI and agentic workflows consume governed data, and comfort using AI-assisted tools in daily work.
Hands-on SQL or BI skills, and experience with data catalogs, semantic layers, or metric stores is helpful, but not required.

Kapitus Total Rewards Package Includes:

• Competitive Salary Range of $117,800-$189,000 annually. Kapitus is providing this as a good faith salary range to comply with applicable law. The applicant’s final salary will depend on a number of factors including the applicant’s geographic location, skills, and experience
• Annual Incentive Compensation Eligibility - up to 10% annually

• Health Insurance: Comprehensive medical, dental, and employer-paid vision plans through UnitedHealthcare (UHC), with various coverage levels available to meet the needs of our employees and their families. Additional perks through UHC include: Sweat Equity, free subscription to the Calm App, UHC rewards, Real Appeal, and Quit For Life.
• Flexible Spending Account: Set aside pre-tax dollars from your paycheck to pay for qualified out-of-pocket medical, dental, vision, pharmacy or dependent care expenses.
• Lifestyle Spending Account: Employer sponsored post-tax benefits that allow reimbursement for expenses related to physical, mental and financial well-being.
• 100% Company Paid Insurances: Kapitus fully covers the cost of basic short-term and long-term disability insurance, as well as vision insurance, ensuring our employees have comprehensive protection without any personal expense.
• Voluntary Insurance: Supplemental life insurance as well as enhanced short- and long-term disability coverage are available through Mutual of Omaha, providing additional security for our employees. Additionally, Colonial Accident and Hospitalization insurances are also available, offering further protection against unforeseen events.
• Paid Maternity and Parental Leave: Beyond state-mandated leave policies, Kapitus provides company-paid maternity and parental leave, supporting our employees during important family milestones.
• Commuter Benefits: We offer pre-tax benefits on parking and commuter expenses to cover travel to and from work.
• LifeBalance Program: Enhance your lifestyle with our LifeBalance membership, which offers discounts on outdoor activities, the arts, health, and fitness. Additional benefits include:
  • Pet and car insurance discounts.
  • Financial services such as LegalShield.
  • Relaxation and stress management tools.
• Plum Benefits Discount Program: Access exclusive discounts on shows, travel, car rentals, and more, enriching your personal and family life.
• Tuition Reimbursement: Pursue further education with up to $5,000 annually in tuition reimbursement, plus opportunities to attend relevant conferences and career development events. Managed through our LSA plan, Kapitus Academy.
• Travel Reimbursement: We also offer travel reimbursement for all work-related travel, supporting your involvement in career and personal development activities.
• Paid Time Off and Sick Time.
• Retirement Benefits : Our 401K plan is managed through Fidelity. To support your long-term financial goals, the company provides a 25% match on your contributions, up to 6% of your annual salary.

About Kapitus:

Kapitus is one of the most reliable and respected names in small business financing. As both a direct lender and a marketplace built with a trusted network of lending partners, we can provide small businesses with the financing they need when, and how it is needed. We have spent our entire existence building a culture that makes us excited to come to work in the morning. Our company is fast paced, teammates need to be self-directed and have an internal motivation to do the right thing, even when the right thing takes a lot of hard work. We show our teammates our appreciation by offering great benefits, competitive pay and solid opportunity for growth.

Company Mission: At Kapitus, our mission is to help small business owners grow their organizations by providing tailored, transparent, and ethical financing solutions. We invest in every business owner’s story and we are dedicated to building lasting relationships to champion their goals. We promise to keep the best interests of our clients at the center of the financing process by operating with transparency, fairness, and integrity.

Consideration will be given to qualified remote candidates residing in states where Kapitus and/or one of its subsidiaries has an established physical presence.