Lead Product Manager- Technical at Mastercard

Our Purpose

Mastercard powers economies and empowers people in 200+ countries and territories worldwide. Together with our customers, we’re helping build a sustainable economy where everyone can prosper. We support a wide range of digital payments choices, making transactions secure, simple, smart and accessible. Our technology and innovation, partnerships and networks combine to deliver a unique set of products and services that help people, businesses and governments realize their greatest potential.

Title and Summary

Lead Product Manager- Technical:

Job Description Summary:

About Mastercard

Mastercard is a global technology company in the payments industry. Our mission is to power an inclusive digital economy that enables everyone, everywhere to benefit from safe, simple, smart, and accessible transactions. Through secure data, trusted networks, strong partnerships, and a passion for innovation, we help individuals, financial institutions, governments, and businesses reach their full potential.
Our culture is guided by our Decency Quotient (DQ), which shapes how we operate both internally and externally. With a presence in more than 210 countries and territories, we are committed to creating a sustainable world that unlocks priceless opportunities for all.

Role Overview:

The Transaction Stream team is seeking a Lead Product Manager – Technical (PM-T) to advance our customer experience strategy through innovation and effective problem-solving. The ideal candidate is highly motivated, customer-focused, analytically strong, and driven by quality. This role requires intellectual curiosity, a strong technical mindset, and a passion for delivering impactful solutions.

The Role:

Product Management – Technical (PM-T) roles work closely with Technical Program Managers, Software Engineers, UX Designers, and internal stakeholders to define business requirements, technical specifications, and user experiences for the platform capabilities they own.
PM-Ts apply the Working Backwards approach to develop clear product concepts and translate them into well-defined requirements. They break down requirements into user stories, prioritize backlogs, and define acceptance criteria. PM-Ts take long-term ownership of their domains, become subject matter experts, and ensure engineering teams are supported with a clean, prioritized backlog.
They continuously innovate, promote reuse of platform building blocks, and define how new capabilities fit into the broader ecosystem. When commercialization opportunities arise, PM-Ts collaborate with product development teams to advance those ideas further.

• All About You – Skills & Experience Needed
• Own the end to end delivery of engineering initiatives, managing planning, execution, and delivery from inception through successful completion
• Proactively manage engineering delivery across multiple teams and dependent organizations, ensuring alignment, transparency, and accountability
• Track progress, manage dependencies, identify risks, and remove blockers to ensure timely and high quality delivery
• Operate across teams and architectures to identify gaps in processes, systems, and workflows, and drive solutions to address them
• Plan and manage a portfolio of related technology projects in a coordinated manner
• Demonstrate deep understanding of system design approaches, underlying technologies, and architectural patterns within the domain
• Maintain strong focus on customer experience, delivery efficiency, and the problems being solved
• Work across multiple scrum teams, either cross cutting across products and technologies or vertically focused on specific capabilities
• Align dependent organizations and facilitate collaboration to mitigate and resolve blocking issues
• Develop deep understanding of both business and technical requirements for the solutions being built
• Understand the needs of engineers and technical operations teams responsible for building, operating, and maintaining systems over their lifecycle
• Identify complex designs and drive simplification by collaborating with architects, software engineers, principals, and TPMs
• Enable informed trade off decisions by balancing business goals, platform strategy, customer experience, performance, and maintainability
• Identify, assess, track, and mitigate issues and risks at multiple levels
• Produce clear, structured documentation; ensure requirements, features, and user stories are easily consumable using techniques such as flowcharts and diagrams
• Lead requirement elaboration and estimation sessions, facilitating input from cross functional teams
• Partner with external technology and UX vendors to support architectural goals, implementation plans, and roadmaps, identifying opportunities to accelerate delivery and learning
• Communicate project status, risks, and escalation needs clearly and professionally to senior leadership
• Anticipate bottlenecks, plan contingencies, and actively manage escalation paths
• Regularly review metrics, define success measures when needed, and improve visibility to ensure alignment with organizational objectives
• Continuously assess and improve development processes, test strategies, and operational practices to enable efficient parallel delivery
• Streamline or eliminate redundant processes across architecture, operations, or business workflows where issues recur year over year
• Lead, coach, and mentor Technical Program Managers and cross functional team members across programs
  You bring:
• A strong inclination to dive deep into the operational and technical characteristics of products
• Proven ability to operate independently with full ownership and autonomy
• A consistent track record of data driven decision making and continuous improvement
• The ability to influence and collaborate with business leaders, architects, engineers, and designers to make sound trade off decisions
• Experience working in Agile delivery environments
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to engage executives, peers, and teams with clarity and impact
• Demonstrated strength in building trusted relationships and influencing without authority
• Payment’s domain knowledge, experience with backend transaction systems, or prior software development experience is a strong plus

Corporate Security Responsibility

All activities involving access to Mastercard assets, information, and networks comes with an inherent risk to the organization and, therefore, it is expected that every person working for, or on behalf of, Mastercard is responsible for information security and must:

• Abide by Mastercard’s security policies and practices;

• Ensure the confidentiality and integrity of the information being accessed;

• Report any suspected information security violation or breach, and

• Complete all periodic mandatory security trainings in accordance with Mastercard’s guidelines.