Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Active Network, part of Global Payments, is dedicated to making the world a more active place through its innovative SaaS technology platform. They are seeking a Forward Deployed Product Manager to lead a strategic engagement with a major client, focusing on delivering a multi-module platform and ensuring alignment between client needs and engineering efforts.
Responsibilities
- Be the forward-deployed product lead — embed with the customer, build trust, and become their day-to-day product point of contact for the engagement
- Run discovery and requirements sessions directly with client stakeholders; surface the real need behind each ask, resolve ambiguity, and drive decisions
- Translate high-level client objectives and race-day operational realities into clear, measurable functional requirements
- Communicate relentlessly — progress, risks, trade-offs, and evolving requirements — to both the customer and internal leadership throughout the project lifecycle
- Define, drive, and maintain the roadmap and backlog for the engagement across both delivery phases — an initial launch and a follow-on phase of enhancements
- Write clear epics, user stories, and acceptance criteria from a detailed SOW spanning registration and checkout, payments and split settlement, dynamic pricing, race passes, transfers, on-site/race-day operations, identity/SSO, APIs/webhooks, and reporting
- Prioritize ruthlessly — sequence initial feature development and ongoing change requests against firm delivery deadlines
- Manage scope against the SOW — identify change requests, quantify their impact on estimate and timeline, and partner with account and delivery leadership to keep the engagement on track
- Quarterback 2–3 development teams — align sprint goals, manage cross-team dependencies, and orchestrate release sequencing across interdependent modules
- Prepare release objectives, milestones, and schedules with engineering, project management, design, and QA across all phases of development and launch
- Partner with Business Analysts and designers to ensure designs and builds meet documented requirements and customer needs
- Coordinate complex, cross-functional areas — Stripe payments and split settlement, international/multi-currency and VAT/GST, and data and reporting delivered via ACTIVE Hub
- Drive launch readiness — support UAT, cutover planning, and post-launch stabilization for race-day-critical functionality
- Act as quarterback of the team and business owner for the overall solution
Skills
- 4+ years in a product management or product owner role
- Bachelor's degree
- Embedded / customer-facing experience — prior forward-deployed, solutions, professional-services, or client-embedded PM work strongly preferred
- Proven track record of delivering complex software projects on time, on quality, and on budget
- Demonstrated experience writing epics, user stories, and functional requirements in an agile environment
- Experience coordinating multiple concurrent development teams and managing cross-team dependencies
- Exposure to SaaS and ecommerce product development; comfort with payments, APIs/webhooks, and third-party integrations
- Excellent communication skills, both verbal and written — able to be the trusted face of the product to an external customer
- Strong business acumen and the ability to translate client objectives into measurable requirements
- Ability to communicate effectively with different personalities and roles (development, sales, support, customer, analyst, executive) and build strong relationships
- Experience in registration, ticketing, events, or endurance/obstacle-course racing (OCR)
- Familiarity with payment processing and split settlement (e.g., Stripe Connect)
- Experience with international commerce, multi-currency, and VAT/GST compliance
- Experience with BI/reporting platforms (Power BI, SQL-based data warehouses)
- Pragmatic Institute (Pragmatic Marketing) Certified
- B2B2C experience
- A passion for endurance sports
Company Overview
Heartland is a fintech company offering payment processing services and point of sale systems for businesses and educational institutions. It was founded in 1997, and is headquartered in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, USA, with a workforce of 1001-5000 employees. Its website is https://www.heartland.us.Company H1B Sponsorship
Heartland has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships, with 1 in 2021. Please note that this does not guarantee sponsorship for this specific role.