Lead Product Manager

The posting, as Ascend wrote it

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 adop
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• 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

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.