Lead Product Manager
Ascend
$180,000 - $240,000 / year
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Description
What We Do
Insurance is a $10T industry still running on PDFs, email threads, and manual reconciliation. Ascend is changing that. We built the first and only complete financial operations platform purpose-built for insurance — combining accounting automation, payments, and premium financing in a single vertically integrated solution. In five years, we've become the market leader: over 4,000 businesses, including more than half of the 50 largest brokers in the country, trust Ascend to bring clarity to complex accounting operations from collection to close.
How We Do It
Ascend automates the financial operations that insurers, MGAs, and agencies run every day and embeds directly into the transactions where money actually moves. Point solutions are easy to build and even easier to copy. The companies that win won't just sell tools — they'll capture value where the money actually moves. Ascend is built for exactly that moment. Our customers don't just adopt software, they unlock measurable efficiency with a proven 5-7x return on investment.
Our team is onsite in San Francisco. We bring deep expertise in insurance, fintech, and financial infrastructure to build what the industry has never had.
Why We Do It
The insurance industry intermediates trillions of dollars — and almost none of that infrastructure was built for the modern era. Legacy systems aren't just inefficient; they're a ceiling on what the industry can become.
Ascend's mission is to become the leading financial automation platform for insurance by 2030 — powering the financial operations of the entire industry and transforming the way trillions of dollars move. We're not building another point solution, we're building the financial backbone of insurance.
Your Role
Ascend is looking for a Lead Product Manager to define the vision and strategy for our core money movement products. You'll start by partnering with an existing product manager and grow into owning this product area overall.
These products span integrations, invoicing, payments, receivables, financing, payouts, funds flow, and the full payment lifecycle. They're closely connected. You'll own vision, strategy, and execution for a defined set of products and also align priorities and sequencing across all of them. Enterprise and strategic customers rely on these products to run increasingly complex financial operations. A big part of the job is using AI to automate those operations. You'll measure where automation is working, find where it isn't, and keep cutting the manual work it takes for customers to close their books.
This role mixes strategy with hands-on technical product work. You'll work directly with customers, write product and technical specs, and work closely with engineering to define how the system behaves and to make tradeoffs. Many of these workflows have never been automated before, so you'll often need to define the problem before you can solve it. You'll be accountable for measurable gains in adoption, operational efficiency, automation, and revenue.
Responsibilities Will Include
Objective #1: In your first 30 days:
- Learn Ascend's platform, how customers work today, and how money moves through our system
- Talk with customers about their financial operations: where they get stuck, where they still work by hand, and what they'll need as they grow
- Work with Engineering to understand the APIs, data models, system behavior, and dependencies between products
- Review the AI and automation already in place: what's working, where exceptions and manual touches still happen, and what drives them
- Present an initial assessment of the biggest opportunities, backed by customer feedback and data
Objective #2: In your first 60 days:
- Define a product vision and strategy based on customer needs and Ascend's business goals
- Set a baseline for operational efficiency, such as manual touches, exception rates, and turnaround time, and set targets for reducing it
- Turn the strategy into a quarterly roadmap with clear priorities, tradeoffs, and expected outcomes
- Write product and technical specs for the top initiatives, covering workflows, system requirements, edge cases, and acceptance criteria
- Align product, engineering, and leadership on priorities, sequencing, and how success will be measured
Objective #3: In your first 90 days and beyond:
- Own and evolve the product vision, and take on more of the product area over time
- Build AI into the core of product workflows to automate manual work and exception handling, with the goal of reducing the time and effort customers spend on their financial operations
- Track how well automation performs, find where it falls short, and keep improving it
- Build capabilities and tooling that scale with enterprise complexity and growth
- Lead initiatives from discovery and spec through launch and adoption, and be accountable for the results
- Work with Engineering on API requirements, data flows, failure scenarios, and system tradeoffs
- Test ideas with prototypes and early releases, and make clear calls on scope and sequencing
- Work across Design, Engineering, GTM, and Operations to simplify financial workflows and anticipate how changes affect other teams and products
Must Have
- 6+ years of product management experience, including 3+ years owning the vision, strategy, and outcomes for a major product area
- A track record of translating product strategy into successful launches and measurable customer and business results
- Experience building for enterprise customers with complex workflows and integration requirements
- Hands-on experience writing product and technical specifications, with clear requirements, edge cases, and acceptance criteria
- Technical and analytical fluency to work with engineers on APIs, data models, and interconnected systems, and use data to guide decisions
- Clear communication and the ability to articulate a compelling vision, make tradeoffs, and align cross-functional teams
Nice to Have
- B2B product experience in fintech, billing, or payments
- Experience in insurance, premium finance, lending, or loan management systems
- Experience building public APIs, platform integrations, or financial infrastructure at scale
- Experience building AI products or applying AI to financial workflows
Base Salary Range
$180,000 - $240,000
#LI-RS1
Benefits
- Unlimited PTO 🌴
- Meaningful equity 🤑
- Dog friendly office 🐕
- Commuter benefits 🚌
- Free lunch in office everyday 🥡
- Health care for you and your dependents 🍎
Equal Opportunity
We are committed to equal opportunity employment and embrace diversity within our organization. We do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.
We encourage candidates to apply even if their experience doesn't precisely match this opportunity. We value diversity and are dedicated to equal opportunity employment.
Benefits
- paid time off
- stock options
About this role
Ascend is rebuilding the financial backbone of insurance by automating operations that have historically run on PDFs and manual reconciliation. As Lead Product Manager for money movement products, you'd own vision and strategy across a connected suite of tools—integrations, invoicing, payments, receivables, financing, and the full payment lifecycle—while growing into leadership of the entire product area. The role blends strategic thinking with hands-on technical work: you'll define product specs, work directly with enterprise customers to understand their pain points, partner closely with engineering on system design, and use AI to systematically reduce manual work and exceptions in how customers close their books.
This is a role for someone with 6+ years of product management experience, including at least three years owning strategy and outcomes for a major product area. You'll need a track record of shipping complex products for enterprise customers, strong technical fluency with APIs and data models, and the ability to write clear product and technical specs that account for edge cases and system dependencies. Experience in fintech, billing, or payments is valuable but not required; what matters more is the ability to learn a new domain quickly, translate customer needs into strategy, and hold teams accountable to measurable results in adoption, efficiency, and revenue.
The first 90 days are structured around learning the platform and customers, defining strategy and roadmap, and then owning execution—building AI into core workflows, tracking automation performance, and leading initiatives from discovery through launch. You'd be based in San Francisco and working on-site with a team that has deep insurance and fintech expertise. The salary range is $180,000–$240,000.
How this employer is doing
average
- Recent Acquisition
Typical pay for this role
$140,000
Typical range: $120,000 to $140,000
In the news
Ascend Learning Acquires M7 Health, Connecting the Full Healthcare Career to Scheduling, GlobeNewswire
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Pay for this role
$180,000 to $240,000 per year
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