Senior Product Manager

Highlights

Country

Remote

Employment

full-time

Salary

Salary will be discussed later

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The Senior Product Manager (SPM) at Mercans plays a pivotal role in driving the vision, development, and delivery of key modules within the global payroll SaaS platform. The SPM leads strategic product planning, execution, and continuous improvement across assigned domains, ensuring alignment with business goals, customer needs, compliance requirements, and market trends.

In this senior leadership capacity, the SPM translates vision into outcomes—owning roadmaps, defining innovative and differentiated product features, driving product-led growth, and collaborating across Product, Engineering, Compliance, Operations, Business Development, and Support. The role is essential to building a scalable, secure, and intelligent platform that supports Mercans’ global expansion and industry leadership in payroll SaaS.

Duties and Responsibilities:

Product Strategy, Roadmap & Lifecycle Management

• Own the product vision, roadmap, and delivery strategy for assigned verticals, ensuring alignment with business objectives, customer priorities, and market trends.
• Translate business needs and compliance mandates into epics, features, and backlog stories
  with clear acceptance criteria and traceability.
• Lead product delivery from discovery through release, ensuring quality, adoption readiness, and continuous feedback loops.

MarketIntelligence & USP Development

• Analyze market trends, emerging technologies, competitive offerings, and customer feedback to identify product gaps and innovation opportunities.
• Define and deliver unique, forward-looking features that serve as clear unique selling points (USPs) and enhance Mercans’ market positioning.
• Collaborate with Marketing and Commercial teams to develop positioning frameworks, competitive battle cards, and feature differentiation collateral.

Global Payroll Engine Strategy & Roadmap

• Own the strategic direction and continuous improvement roadmap for Mercans’ global payroll engine, ensuring scalability, multi-country adaptability, and statutory compliance across all supported jurisdictions.
• Define product architecture and logic layers that support gross-to-net calculations, multi-currency processing, statutory deductions, tax rules, contributions, and retroactive adjustments.
• Collaborate with the Compliance team to embed country-specific rules and localization features, ensuring automated, up-to-date statutory configuration across all markets.
• Partner with Engineering and Data Science to deliver AI/ML-powered logic, such as anomaly detection in payroll runs, predictive net pay variance, and intelligent error correction.
• Ensure payroll engine supports on-demand payroll, batch payroll, and event-driven triggers, with complete traceability, audit logs, and reconciliation controls.
• Establish benchmarking and accuracy frameworks to measure engine performance against SLA targets for processing time, accuracy, and compliance adherence.
• Define API-first logic layers to enable external integration with time, attendance, HR, and finance systems while maintaining rule integrity and data validation.
• Lead modernization efforts by transitioning legacy calculation scripts or hard-coded rules into configurable, reusable rule engines that support version control and auditability.
• Collaborate with customer-facing teams to localize engine configurations for white-label, reseller, or embedded use cases, supporting rapid deployment and ease of administration.

Platform Scalability & Modularization

• Champion the modularization of the platform, enabling scalable, repeatable delivery models for multi-tenant, enterprise, and mid-market clients.
• Define reusable product components, configuration templates, and feature toggles to support faster deployments and higher configurability.
• Partner with Engineering and Implementation to architect scalable platform modules.

Customer Success Enablement & Partnership

• Collaborate with Customer Success/BAU Managers (CSMs) to ensure successful feature onboarding, usage optimization, and value realization.
• Participate in QBRs, onboarding workshops, and strategic client conversations to align roadmaps with client outcomes.
• Address client escalations tied to product functionality, proactively mitigating risks and ensuring follow-through on corrective actions.
• Provide enablement tools including training guides, troubleshooting workflows, usage dashboards, and support documentation.

Partner & Ecosystem Product Enablement

• Define product features and APIs to support white-label clients, resellers, and channel partners.
• Deliver integration toolkits, configuration documentation, and reusable interface specifications to support scalable partner implementations.
• Collaborate with Business Development to align platform capabilities with co-sell and co-delivery models.

API, Integration & Ecosystem Management

• Define business and technical requirements for third-party integrations (e.g., HRIS, WFM, ERP, finance systems).
• Manage the lifecycle of public APIs and embedded integrations, ensuring SLAs, security standards, and extensibility.
• Enable seamless client data exchange through configurable mapping, validation, and transformation rules.

Implementation & Support Workflow Alignment

• Collaborate with Operations and Support teams to align product features with real-world delivery processes.
• Identify product-led solutions to reduce onboarding effort, eliminate manual configuration errors, and streamline client setup.
• Lead delivery of internal tooling or self-service capabilities to reduce operational burden on support and configuration teams.

Change Management & Customer Communication

• Define and execute structured change management processes for product releases, including internal readiness and client-facing communications.
• Provide impact assessments and rollout plans for high-impact features, compliance updates, or interface changes.
• Develop tailored change communications by feature segment and customer tier.

Compliance & Regulatory Readiness

• Ensure statutory compliance across all jurisdictions supported by the platform, including delivery of legal updates and localization features.
• Maintain audit-readiness documentation for ISO/SOC requirements, including traceability of requirements, QA artifacts, and release history.
• Monitor global regulatory developments and proactively plan for impact on product roadmaps.

Security, Privacy & Data Governance

• Collaborate with Information Security and QCRM teams to embed privacy, encryption, and access controls into all product features.
• Support secure-by-design product practices including role-based access, configurable data retention, and audit trail capabilities.

AI/ML Innovation & Automation

• Lead ideation and delivery of AI/ML-powered features such as predictive payroll error detection, intelligent configuration recommendations, and fraud monitoring.
• Partner with Data Science and Engineering to validate models, build MVPs, and track feature outcomes in production.

Commercial & Financial Awareness

• Partner with Business Development and Finance to assess monetization potential, feature packaging strategies, and cost-to-serve impact for new modules.
• Support commercial teams with value propositions, usage-based pricing analysis, and business case development for premium features.

Product Analytics & Outcome Measurement

• Define product success metrics including usage, adoption, retention, task completion time, and operational savings.
• Collaborate with Analytics teams to track real-time performance dashboards and provide post-release outcome reports to stakeholders.
• Integrate KPIs into roadmap prioritization and cross-functional review cycles.

Operational Excellence & Product Delivery Process

• Lead initiatives to improve sprint cadence, backlog hygiene, QA readiness, and stakeholder communication throughout the delivery lifecycle.
• Collaborate with Engineering team to standardize sprint rituals, reporting templates, and risk registers.

Innovation Pipeline Governance

• Establish a structured process for ideation intake, feasibility scoring, stakeholder validation, and prioritization of innovative features.
• Maintain a curated innovation backlog with transparent status tracking and executive review touchpoints.
• Promote innovation culture through collaboration with internal teams, clients, and partners.

Team Mentorship & Product Leadership

• Mentor junior product managers and associates, providing regular coaching, feedback, and growth plans.
• Champion internal product education through demo sessions, workshops, and onboarding content.
• Promote ownership, documentation discipline, and customer empathy within the product team.

Education and Experience:

• Minimum Requirements: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Business, or Information Systems from a
  recognized and accredited institution.
• Minimum 10 years of progressive experience in product management within B2B SaaS environments, with at least 5 years in a senior or strategic product leadership role.
• At least 3 years of hands-on experience in a product management role at a payroll software or payroll SaaS company, with a demonstrable understanding of the industry’s operational and compliance challenges.
• Deep knowledge of global payroll processes, including gross-to-net calculations, statutory configuration, regulatory compliance, and localization across multiple jurisdictions.
• Proven experience delivering compliance-sensitive product features across globally distributed platforms, including coordination with cross-functional teams (Compliance, QA, Security, Engineering).
• Strong technical proficiency in APIs, modular architecture, platform scalability, and data integration strategies with systems such as HRIS, ERP, and WFM.
• Demonstrated expertise in Agile product development, including backlog management, epic/story creation, sprint planning, and roadmap ownership.
• Ability to translate business and compliance requirements into scalable, customer-centric product solutions with traceable outcomes.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Master’s degree (MBA or MS) in Product Management, Innovation, Technology Leadership, or Business Strategy.
• Extensive knowledge of international payroll systems, global statutory compliance requirements, and localization frameworks, especially in multi-jurisdictional contexts.
• Hands-on experience with statutory configuration modules, compliance automation, and payroll rule engines.
• Familiarity with data privacy and information security frameworks such as GDPR, ISO 27001, SOC 2, and data residency controls.
• Background in monetization strategy, including feature packaging, usage-based pricing, and cost-to-serve modeling.
• Prior success in building or scaling white-label SaaS products, reseller enablement models, and partner-centric platforms.
• Professional certifications such as PMP, SAFe® Product Manager/Product Owner (PM/PO), Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO), or Pragmatic Institute PMC certification.