Executive Director, Product Lead - Merchant Services in London

Responsibilities

• Set and own the product strategy across commerce and payments workstreams, grounded in customer needs and business outcomes.
• Represent the product function to the CCB partner organization and translate their needs into platform direction while building lasting trust.
• Lead, develop, and hold accountable a multi-level product team; hire to a high bar and give direct, specific feedback that builds capability.
• Own org design and talent planning for the product function across workstreams, identify capability gaps, build succession depth, and create an environment where PMs grow faster than elsewhere.
• Operate as a genuine peer to the senior engineering lead; co-own outcomes, resolve trade-offs, and model cross-functional partnership.
• Guard prioritisation at the platform level; foresee and absorb changing demands without passing ambiguity onto the team.
• Maintain real customer proximity and ensure the team's decisions are rooted in evidence from customers, not assumptions or second-hand summaries.
• Navigate the firm’s matrix and institutional requirements with sophistication; unblock systemic dependencies rather than work around them.
• Drive a robust risk and control environment across all product areas, ensuring customer-readiness benchmarks are met before any rollout.

Qualifications

• Extensive product management experience, with strong experience in payments or commerce infrastructure and leading multi-level product teams including other people managers.
• Direct experience with merchant-facing or B2B payments products; credible in conversations about payment flows, merchant needs, and commerce infrastructure.
• Track record of formulating and executing product strategy across multiple concurrent workstreams with measurable business outcomes.
• Demonstrated ability to build, develop, and retain high-performing product teams; grow capability beyond managing performance.
• Experience as the primary product interface to a merchant or B2B payments partner, building trust through domain credibility and delivery.
• Strong commercial judgment and the ability to make sound calls where data is incomplete and articulate reasoning clearly.
• Deep experience operating in regulated financial services with a working understanding of risk, controls, and compliance frameworks.
• Proven ability to operate across organizational boundaries, building coalitions without formal authority.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building or scaling a commerce or payments platform from early stages through to production at scale.
• Background working within or closely alongside a large financial institution’s consumer or business banking division.
• Familiarity with modern engineering practices, APIs, and platform thinking; credible in technical conversations without being an engineer.
• Experience operating in a venture or accelerator environment inside a large organization, balancing pace with institutional governance.

Culture & Values

We are a people-first team that values collaboration, curiosity, commitment, and the diversity of thought, experience and background. By bringing people with different points of view together, we can represent everyone and truly reflect the communities we serve.