Hybrid Product Manager – Payments

at SpotOn

• Job title: Product Manager – Payments
• Job type: Full Time
• Experience level: Mid level, Senior
• Salary: $180,000 - $225,000 per year
• Degree requirement: Bachelor's Degree
• Location requirements: Hybrid, Chicago, United States

About the role

• Product Manager overseeing payment acceptance capabilities focusing on hospitality merchants at SpotOn. Collaborating with engineering, design, and sales teams to enhance payment experience.

Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end product roadmap for payment acceptance in card-present (CP) and card-not-present (CNP) environments, with a focus on hospitality use cases such as table service, counter service, bars, quick-service, and multi-location groups.
• Define the strategy for how each payment media type is presented and accepted at the terminal, including chip, contactless, ecommerce tokens, and white label loyalty, and set the metrics that measure acceptance health.
• Translate complex payment acceptance flows into simple, intuitive experiences for merchants and their staff, including refund, tip, adjustment, partial authorization, and offline/stand-in authorization scenarios.
• Design and optimize payment authorization, clearing, and settlement flows in alignment with ISO 8583, ISO 14443, and EMVCo Specification and other relevant scheme and network requirements, ensuring accurate, resilient, and compliant transaction processing.
• Partner with payment engineering teams to define requirements, APIs, and technical specifications for terminal integrations, SDK integrations, gateways, tokenization, risk services, and transaction routing.
• Monitor and improve key payment performance metrics (e.g., authorization rates, chargebacks, declines, retries, disputes, latency, reconciliation accuracy) and lead experiments to improve them.
• Collaborate with risk, compliance, and security teams to ensure adherence to network rules, card brand requirements, and industry standards (PCI DSS), and to define merchant onboarding, monitoring, and remediation workflows.
• Partner with GTM teams to package and position payment capabilities in a way that differentiates SpotOn for hospitality merchants, working closely with Sales, Account Management, and Customer Success.
• Use data and merchant feedback to prioritize features, quantify impact, and drive a rigorous experimentation culture for new payment capabilities (e.g., digital wallets, stored cards, recurring billing, surcharging or dual pricing where compliant).
• Lead discovery with external processors, acquirers, gateways, and third-party partners to evaluate and implement new capabilities, routing options, or cost-optimization opportunities.
• Ensure that operational teams (support, implementations, risk operations, finance, and settlement teams) have the tooling, workflows, and documentation needed to support merchants at scale.
• Act as the primary product point of contact for payment acceptance across SpotOn, aligning stakeholders around a clear vision, roadmap, and success metrics.
• Facilitate cross-functional decision-making, balancing technical constraints, regulatory considerations, and merchant needs to arrive at pragmatic, high-impact solutions.
• Communicate clearly and consistently with executives and senior leaders on trade-offs, risks, dependencies, and progress for payment initiatives.
• Drive alignment between product, engineering, design, operations, GTM, and finance by creating transparent backlogs, roadmaps, and status updates that keep everyone moving in the same direction.
• Advocate for hospitality merchants and their staff, bringing qualitative feedback and quantitative insights into planning and prioritization discussions.
• Mentor and influence peers and adjacent product teams on payment best practices, shared capabilities, and platform standards to avoid fragmentation and duplicate solutions.
• Contribute to a culture of accountability, urgency, and ownership, ensuring that cross-functional teams deliver high-quality releases on time and learn quickly from launches.

Requirements

• 5+ years of product management experience, with at least 3 years focused on payments, fintech, or closely related financial services products.
• Deep understanding of card-present and card-not-present payment acceptance, including authorization, capture, clearing, settlement, tokenization, risk, and chargeback flows.
• Demonstrated familiarity with ISO 8583 & 20022 and card-network messaging, and the ability to work effectively with engineers and partners using ISO 8583:2023 & 20022 aligned message specifications.
• Experience working with payment processors, acquirers, gateways, or card networks, ideally in a platform or multi-tenant merchant environment.
• Strong analytical skills, including comfort working with large payment datasets, building dashboards, defining KPIs, and using data to drive prioritization and experimentation.
• Proven success shipping complex, technical products that require deep collaboration with engineering and operations teams.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain complex payment concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Customer-centric mindset with experience conducting discovery, user interviews, and feedback sessions with merchants or similar B2B customers.
• High degree of ownership, bias toward action, and ability to manage multiple initiatives in parallel in a fast-paced, high-growth environment.
• Hospitality, retail, or point-of-sale experience is strongly preferred but not required.

Benefits

• Medical, Dental and Vision Insurance
• 401k with company match
• RSUs
• Paid vacation, 10 company holidays, sick time, and volunteer time off
• Employee Resource Groups to build community and inclusion at work
• Monthly cell phone and internet stipend
• Tuition reimbursement for up to $2,000 per calendar year to assist with your professional development