Director, Insurance Product Management
On-siteDurham, North Carolina, United States
Job Summary
Manage execution of the roadmap across all assigned insurance systems and operational capability areas, ensuring priorities are delivered on schedule and issues are resolved quickly. Coach and hold accountable a team of Product Managers, overseeing their day-to-day work on roadmap execution, stakeholder management, prioritization, and delivery. Partner with stakeholders across Operations, Actuarial, Accounting, Compliance, Distribution, Technology, Finance, Data, and external vendors to coordinate priorities, resolve cross-system dependencies, and keep delivery on track. Work with business teams to inform insurance systems strategy and vision, ensuring execution aligns with evolving business direction. Oversee discovery and requirements-gathering efforts to surface operational pain points, exception paths, and automation opportunities. Review and approve how business needs are translated into product requirements, business rules, workflows, acceptance criteria, and delivery-ready backlog items. Own day-to-day tradeoff decisions across new capabilities, servicing needs, operational defects, vendor constraints, technical debt, and business readiness. Provide direct oversight of backlog refinement and represent the product organization in planning, delivery reviews, and release readiness discussions. Manage business readiness execution, including training rollout, UAT/BAT coordination, and adoption tracking. Track and report on portfolio-level delivery metrics such as processing efficiency, cycle time, accuracy, and system adoption. Manage vendor relationships and coordinate contract discussions in partnership with Finance and Procurement.
Required Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Computer Information Technology, Business, a related field, or equivalent professional experience
- Minimum of 12-14+ years of experience in product management, product ownership, business analysis, or related enterprise application functions, including experience directly managing a team
- Demonstrated experience managing, coaching, and holding accountable Product Managers or similar product/business analysis professionals
- Experience working within financial services, insurance, annuities, life insurance, or related highly regulated industries
- Experience managing delivery for enterprise applications, operational systems, policy administration, servicing, workflow, document generation, integrations, data exchange, or related insurance business capabilities across multiple teams
- Strong understanding of software delivery processes and proven experience managing execution in Agile or iterative development environments
- Ability to manage a portfolio of concurrent priorities in a fast-paced environment with shifting business needs, limited capacity, and cross-functional/cross-team dependencies
- Demonstrated ability to partner with business leaders on strategy and vision for insurance systems areas, and translate that direction into actionable, executable roadmaps
- Experience partnering with and coordinating cross-functional business and technical teams, including Operations, Accounting, Actuarial, Compliance, Data, Finance, Distribution, Engineering, and external vendors
- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with the ability to guide investigation of system behavior, operational workflows, financial outputs, data issues, integration failures, and production defects
- Experience working with APIs, batch processing, integrations, extracts, enterprise workflows, data validation, or downstream system dependencies
- Ability to oversee the definition, refinement, and prioritization of epics, features, user stories, business rules, acceptance criteria, and business readiness needs across a team
- Strong verbal and written communication skills with the ability to coordinate across stakeholders and translate between business and technology audiences
- Ability to manage competing priorities, exercise sound judgment, and drive team execution to completion with minimal oversight
- Required to be onsite 3 days a week at our Durham, NC headquarters
Desired Qualifications
- Experience supporting annuity or life insurance products, policy administration systems, insurance operations, or regulated financial services systems strongly preferred
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