Product Owner, Integrated Payables

About Zact

Zact is a fintech innovator dedicated to helping organizations simplify expense and payment management. Our platform aligns employees, finance, and accounting with stronger controls, cleaner workflows, and continuous reconciliation to financial systems.

Role Overview

The Product Owner, Integrated Payables is a hands-on product leader responsible for defining, prioritizing, and delivering Zact’s accounts payable and business payments product, which banks offer to their commercial customers.

Integrated Payables takes an invoice from receipt to reconciled payment: invoices arrive by email, upload, or payment instruction file (PIF); are OCR’d and coded; route through approvals; are paid on the best rail (virtual card, ACH, or check); and post back to the customer’s accounting system. The Product Owner owns that end-to-end experience and the backlog that drives it.

At Zact, this role combines two jobs that many companies split: Product Owner and Technical Product Manager (TPM). We do not use separate project managers. Our experience is that delivery is managed best by the person who knows the product most deeply, so the Product Owner owns both what gets built and how it gets delivered for Integrated Payables.

That means being on every sprint call with the engineering team, working with the Bank Delivery team to keep the backlog prioritized around what our banks need, constantly grooming the backlog, and personally driving features from requirement through release. We are looking for a working product owner who can get deep into AP and payments workflows, understand the technical design well enough to make real-time trade-offs, and keep delivery on track without handing it off to someone else.

The successful candidate will combine strong product judgment with technical fluency and a practical understanding of how payables actually work inside a finance team, and how banks and card processors deliver commercial payments. This person will help make Integrated Payables a compelling reason for banks to choose Zact and a meaningful driver of virtual card adoption and revenue.

Key Responsibilities

Product Ownership

• Build a deep understanding of Zact’s Integrated Payables product, the AP workflows of business customers, the bank distribution model, and the competitive landscape.
• Own the Integrated Payables product backlog and the product vision behind it, balancing bank commitments, revenue opportunities, technical debt, and long-term direction.
• Translate business needs into clear, well-structured user stories with detailed acceptance criteria, workflows, and edge cases that engineering can build against with confidence.
• Define and continually improve core payables capabilities, including invoice capture and OCR/AI extraction, PIF imports, GL coding, PO matching, approval workflows, and payment authorization.
• Drive the payment execution experience, including payment method prioritization across single-use and multi-use virtual cards, ACH, and check, with an emphasis on increasing card adoption.
• Own vendor-facing capabilities such as vendor enrollment, vendor portal, remittance advice, and supplier card acceptance programs.
• Ensure strong controls are built into the product, including role-based permissions, multi-factor authentication for sensitive actions, fraud prevention, and complete audit trails.
• Identify opportunities to apply AI and automation across the payables lifecycle to reduce manual effort for AP teams.

Technical Delivery (TPM)

• Attend every sprint call for Integrated Payables, including stand-ups, backlog refinement, sprint planning, sprint reviews, and retrospectives, as the engineering team’s day-to-day product partner.
• Own end-to-end delivery of Integrated Payables features: plan releases, track progress, manage dependencies, and identify and clear blockers before they affect timelines.
• Work with engineering on technical design, APIs, data flows, and integration approaches, and make informed scope and sequencing trade-offs in real time.
• Coordinate delivery across dependent teams and partners, including processors, card issuing and payment rails, accounting and ERP integrations, and QA.
• Manage delivery risks, issues, and changes to scope or timelines, and communicate status clearly to leadership, Bank Delivery, and sales.
• Accept completed work against acceptance criteria, lead user acceptance testing, and ensure releases meet a high standard of quality.
• Own release readiness, including release notes, product documentation, and enablement content for banks, sales, and customer success.

Bank Delivery Partnership

• Work closely with the Bank Delivery team to understand each bank’s requirements, implementation timelines, and go-live commitments.
• Continually groom and reprioritize the backlog based on bank needs, ensuring commitments to banks are reflected in sprint plans and delivered on time.
• Participate in bank implementation discussions as the product expert, clarifying requirements, setting realistic expectations, and resolving product questions quickly.
• Triage bank-reported issues and enhancement requests with bank delivery and support and fold them into the backlog with clear priority.
• Engage directly with banks, business customers, sales, and implementation teams to gather feedback, validate solutions, and support demos and active opportunities.
• Establish practical product and delivery metrics, such as sprint predictability, on-time bank commitments, straight-through processing rates, and card payment mix, and use them to guide prioritization.

Required Qualifications

Product Ownership Experience

• 5+ years of experience as a Product Owner, Product Manager, or Business Analyst, ideally on B2B SaaS or fintech products.
• Demonstrated ability to write clear user stories, acceptance criteria, and functional requirements for complex workflows.
• Hands-on experience working in Agile/Scrum teams and leading backlog refinement, sprint planning, and sprint reviews.
• Comfort operating in a fast-paced, entrepreneurial environment where priorities evolve and initiative matters.

Technical Product & Delivery Management

• Experience owning delivery end to end, as a Technical Product Manager, TPM, or Product Owner without dedicated project management support.
• Technical fluency to engage engineers on APIs, data models, integrations, and system design, and to make sound scope and sequencing trade-offs.
• Experience planning releases, managing dependencies across teams and external partners, and keeping delivery on track.
• Proficiency with Agile delivery tools such as Jira or Azure DevOps.

Accounts Payable & Payments Expertise

• Strong understanding of accounts payable processes, including invoice capture, coding, approvals, PO matching, and payment runs.
• Working knowledge of B2B payment rails, including virtual cards, ACH, wires, and checks, and of how vendor enrollment and card acceptance programs work.
• Familiarity with OCR/AI invoice extraction, payment instruction files, and accounting or ERP integrations.
• Understanding of cash- and accrual-based accounting and how AP data flows to the general ledger.

Analytical & Problem-Solving Capability

• Ability to break complex business problems into clear, buildable increments and to make sound prioritization trade-offs.
• Comfort working with data to measure product performance and inform decisions; SQL or reporting tool experience is a plus.
• Strong attention to detail, particularly around edge cases, exceptions, and controls in financial workflows.

Collaboration & Communication

• Ability to work closely with engineering, QA, design, Bank Delivery, sales, and partner teams.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain technical concepts to business audiences and business needs to technical teams.
• Ability to engage directly with banks, business customers, and partners to gather requirements and validate solutions.

Education

• BS/BA degree or equivalent professional experience

Preferred Qualifications

Fintech & Banking Experience

• Past experience at Bill.com, AvidXchange, or MineralTree would be very relevant. Experience with other AP automation or payables platforms (for example, Tipalti) is highly valued.
• Experience in commercial banking, treasury management, commercial cards, or card processing is a strong plus.
• Familiarity with fraud prevention, payment security, and compliance requirements in financial services.