Purpose of the Role
AFS is the leading provider of commercial loan lifecycle management software for large U.S. banks, and the AFSVision platform runs the commercial lending operations of many of the largest institutions in the country. The Product Manager, Capital Markets owns the Capital Markets workflows within AFSVision end to end — syndications, loan trading, and participations — defining what gets built, why it matters to agent and member banks, and how it advances AFS’s strategic and commercial goals. This role exists to close the gap between technical development and customer experience, translating market trends, client feedback, and regulatory change into a prioritized roadmap the organization can execute against. Success is measured in capabilities that are competitive, scalable, profitable, and demonstrably adopted by the banks that depend on AFSVision every day.
This domain covers:
• Syndications — agent and member
• Participations bought and sold
• Trader workstation, allocations, and mark-to-market
• Holders of record and funds management
• Swinglines and loan trading
Scope of Responsibility and Authority
This role owns the full product lifecycle for the Capital Markets workflows of the AFSVision suite, including continuous discovery, opportunity framing, requirements, prototyping and validation, release readiness, launch, and post-launch iteration. The Product Manager decides backlog priority and sequencing within the approved investment parameters, decides which assumptions are tested and in what order, decides prototype fidelity, and makes the call to loop, revise, or kill an opportunity before it reaches production build. Client feedback reaches the Product Manager through the Product Operations intake funnel for a productization disposition before estimation, with delivery and client communication owned by Professional Services or Support. Changes to committed client deliverables, investment beyond approved capacity, product pricing and packaging, contractual commitments, and decisions that materially affect platform architecture or adjacent product domains are escalated to the Chief Product Officer as appropriate.
This role will interact heavily with the Lead Designer. New interaction patterns produced during prototyping are contributed back to the design system rather than forked, and Design owns the standards those contributions must meet. The role also operates within AFS’s regulated environment, including FFIEC examination, SOC 2, and client audit obligations, so that auditability, data protection, and change control are treated as design inputs rather than downstream concerns. The Product Manager, Capital Markets partners closely with the Principal Product Manager, AFSVision to ensure the Capital Markets roadmap stays cohesive with the other three lending-function themes.
Core Responsibilities
• Define — the product vision, long-term goals, and multi-year strategy for the Capital Markets theme of the AFSVision suite, aligned to AFS’s enterprise strategy and commercial objectives.
• Own — a prioritized, sequenced roadmap across syndications, participations, trader workstation, funds management, and loan trading that balances client feedback, market and regulatory trends, technical health, and business objectives, and defend the trade-offs behind it.
• Discover — continuously rather than only when a project opens, drawing on client interviews, support tickets, telemetry, and sales calls with agent and member banks, and using AI to synthesize that corpus into recurring pains, supporting evidence, and a maintained opportunity backlog.
• Frame — each opportunity as a measurable outcome rather than a feature, producing a one-page problem brief with the evidence attached before any solution work begins.
• Map — the assumptions that would kill an idea if they proved wrong, using AI to draft requirements, user stories, edge cases, and non-functional constraints from the opportunity brief and discovery corpus, then cutting, correcting, and ranking that draft so requirements enter the cycle as hypotheses rather than commitments.
• Prototype — against the riskiest assumption, using AI to produce a working prototype built only from approved design system components and tokens, choosing fidelity deliberately, and keeping mock data and hardcoded states in bounds while avoiding forked components and custom CSS.
• Validate — with five to eight users per round, using AI to draft the test script from the assumption list and to turn session recordings into a per-assumption verdict of supported, killed, or still unknown.
• Decide — to loop, revise, or kill within cycles of three to ten days, and determine whether an opportunity is economical on development estimate, architectural impact, and time to market before it consumes engineering capacity.
• Harvest — validated prototypes with the engineer and designer triad, splitting the result into code that promotes as is, code that serves as a spec but requires hardening for data, authorization, and error handling, and new patterns that must be contributed back to the design system before the feature ships.
• Partner — with engineering and design through production build, where the prototype and hardened requirements are the spec and engineering owns architecture, state, performance, accessibility, and tests.
• Instrument — every release with the success metric defined at opportunity framing, and route results back into the opportunity backlog so that discovery, delivery, and learning stay one continuous loop.
• Disposition — client, Customer 1st, and change control demand arriving through the Product Operations intake funnel, deciding what productizes into the Capital Markets roadmap and what returns to Professional Services or Support, and documenting the rationale for anything declined.
• Collaborate — with sales and marketing so that Capital Markets capabilities are positioned effectively and aligned to go-to-market strategy, contributing to messaging, competitive narrative, demo scenarios, launch readiness, and sales enablement to agent and member banks.
• Communicate — product progress, changes, and trade-offs clearly and proactively to executives, engineering leads, internal partners, and clients.
• Ensure — that requirements satisfy AFS’s regulatory, security, and audit obligations by engaging risk and compliance partners early in the definition process.
First 12 Months Outcomes: What Success Looks Like
Success in the first year is defined by demonstrating ownership of the Capital Markets domain and running the product development lifecycle around those capabilities. That means a roadmap the business trusts, opportunities framed as outcomes and tested against prototypes before engineering commits, releases that land on schedule and get adopted, and evidence of durable domain expertise in syndications and loan trading, all while meeting AFS’s compliance and quality standards.
• Publish and maintain a rolling four- to six-quarter roadmap for Capital Markets, reviewed quarterly with engineering, sales, and executive stakeholders, with every committed item traceable to a documented client, market, or regulatory driver.
• Run continuous discovery producing 20 or more structured client and prospect conversations in year one with agent and member banks, syndication desks, and loan trading operations, synthesized into a maintained opportunity backlog in which every entry carries the evidence behind it.
• Frame at least six opportunities as one-page problem briefs stating a measurable outcome rather than a feature, each with a ranked assumption list attached.
• Run at least six validated prototype cycles, testing with five to eight users per round and closing 80% or more of ranked assumptions to a verdict of supported or killed, with a median cycle time of ten days or less.
• Kill or materially reshape at least two opportunities on prototype evidence before they consume engineering capacity, and document the reasoning.
• Deliver at least three significant capability releases across syndications, participations, trader workstation, or funds management, meeting 90% or better on-time delivery against committed release scope and dates, with 60% or more of targeted clients actively using each major release within two quarters of general availability.
• Ship 100% of releases with the success metric from opportunity framing instrumented at launch, feeding a product performance dashboard reviewed monthly with product and engineering leadership.
• Produce prototypes with zero forked components or custom CSS, contributing every new pattern back to the design system before the feature ships, and define requirements that result in zero audit, security, or regulatory findings attributable to product-defined functionality.
Ways of Working
• Customer-obsessed and evidence-driven. Decisions are grounded in observed client behavior, usage data, and direct conversation rather than assumption or the loudest voice in the room.
• Hypotheses before commitments. Requirements start as ranked assumptions to be tested, and the cheapest way to be wrong is preferred to the most confident way to be certain.
• Outcome over output. Success is measured by adoption, client impact, and business results, not by the volume of features shipped.
• Prototype to learn, not to impress. Fidelity is a deliberate choice matched to the question being asked, and killing an idea early counts as a good outcome.
• Radical clarity. Requirements, decision records, and status updates are written down and leave no one guessing about priority or intent.
• Collaborative but decisive. Input is gathered widely, the call is made and committed to, and anything belonging to someone else is escalated quickly.
• Compliance by design. Regulatory, security, and audit requirements are treated as first-class design inputs in a regulated banking environment.
• Ownership without authority. Work moves across engineering, sales, marketing, and implementation through credibility, preparation, and consistent follow-through.
Profile
The right person is a curious, structured thinker who is equally comfortable in a discovery conversation with a bank’s syndication or loan trading desk and in a refinement session with engineers. They are opinionated but not attached, willing to change direction when the evidence changes, and disciplined about saying no to good ideas that do not serve the strategy. They bring order to ambiguity, turning scattered feedback, competing priorities, and complex regulatory constraints into a clear and defensible plan. They take personal ownership of outcomes rather than handing work off at the boundary of their role.
Qualifications
We are looking for a hands-on product manager who can own the Capital Markets domain, earn the trust of sophisticated banking clients, and turn complex syndication and loan trading problems into shipped software. Prior experience with enterprise B2B software is important, and evidence of having taken products from definition through launch to measurable adoption matters most.
• Subject matter expertise in commercial lending, private credit operations, CLOs, or loan syndication operations is strongly preferred.
• Experience owning a product or product area in an enterprise B2B or SaaS environment, with a clear orientation toward client outcomes and commercial results.
• Hands-on fluency with AI tooling for research synthesis, requirement and user story drafting, prototype generation, and test analysis, with the judgment to treat that output as a draft to be verified, cut, and ranked rather than an answer.
• Background in commercial lending, banking, credit/loan financial services, or related fintech, or demonstrated ability to develop deep functional expertise in a complex and highly regulated domain quickly.
• Demonstrated ability to take capabilities from concept through requirements, delivery, and launch, with measurable adoption after release.
• Experience validating concepts with real users in small rounds and acting on the result, including the discipline to kill or reshape an idea the evidence does not support.
• Comfort working within a design system and its component and token standards, and contributing new patterns back rather than building one-off solutions.
• Strong functional and technical judgment, with the ability to partner credibly with engineering on trade-offs, feasibility, and sequencing without needing to write the code.
• Proven skill in discovery and prioritization, synthesizing client interviews, usage data, competitive intelligence, and business objectives into a defensible roadmap.
• Bias toward evidence and follow-through, with a track record of defining success metrics up front and using them to drive iteration after launch.
• Comfort operating in a regulated and audited environment, working within FFIEC, SOC 2, and client audit constraints.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the presence to align engineering leads, executives, and client stakeholders around a shared plan.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience. Agile delivery experience in a scaled product organization is preferred.
Work Environment & Physical Demands
Work is performed primarily in an office setting during normal business hours, with limited evening requirements for special events. Flexible schedule options are available in accordance with AFS company policy. This role requires high-frequency use of computer keyboards and monitors.
Position Description Disclaimer
To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform each essential duty listed above satisfactorily. Reasonable accommodation may be made to enable qualified individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions of this role. This position description is intended to provide guidelines for job expectations and is not an exhaustive list of all functions, responsibilities, skills, and abilities. Additional functions and requirements may be assigned by supervisors as deemed appropriate.
This document does not constitute a contract of employment. AFS reserves the right to modify this position description and assign tasks as business needs require.
Automated Financial Systems, LLC is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.