Product Manager, Customer & Accounts Platform

Roadmap & Initiative Definition

• Own a single product roadmap across the Customer and Accounts platforms, sequenced against franchise commercial priorities, Core Banking Programme commitments and the platform’s delivery capacity.
• Balance platform reliability, new capability and migration work in one plan, and make the trade-offs between them explicit rather than letting the loudest demand set the order.
• Run discovery with the squads and franchises that depend on the platform, establishing the underlying customer and business need, the platform behaviour it implies, and whether the platform can support it.
• Convert consumer demand into well-formed initiatives with a clear problem statement, scope, dependencies and definition of success, so the squad has a credible, prioritised pipeline of work.
• Take on the problems that are too large or too cross-cutting for any single product squad to own, the ones that only become solvable when one platform holds the whole picture.
• Own migration and decommissioning planning for legacy customer and account infrastructure, including how records are matched, moved, reconciled and proven correct.
• Bring a point of view. Where a request is poorly formed, unaffordable or better solved elsewhere in the estate, say so early and propose the alternative.

Product Definition on the Platform

• Own how the Customer Platform behaves — matching, merge and deduplication rules, what constitutes the golden record, how customer data is maintained and corrected, and the downstream consequences of any change to that record — including configuration and the rationale behind every parameter choice.
• Own how the Accounts Platform behaves — account creation, lifecycle states and closure, how instructions reach Vault Core, and how posting and event behaviour is exposed back to consuming systems.
• Treat the platform API surface as a product in its own right: own its definition, versioning and documentation, so every consuming system has stable contracts to build against and no consumer is surprised by a change.
• Set the standards for how other squads integrate with the platform, covering integration patterns, idempotency, error handling and testing, and make sure they are understood and followed.
• Translate consumer needs, regulatory obligations and platform constraints into unambiguous requirements, with user stories and acceptance criteria covering happy path, unhappy path, boundary and invalid-input cases.
• Decide whether a need is met by configuration, new platform capability, or a change in the consuming system, and make the trade-off explicit rather than defaulting to build.
• Build in the controls the Bank needs from the outset: FCA and Consumer Duty outcomes, accuracy and lineage of customer and account data, auditable behaviour, and correct treatment under financial crime and data protection obligations.
• Grow the Customer Platform as the Bank’s single source of truth for who we deal with, rather than one more system holding a partial view.
• Make each new product and franchise faster and lower-effort to launch by building reusable capability rather than one-off integrations.
• Review implemented behaviour against requirements alongside engineers, and own product sign-off through test and UAT.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Work day to day with the engineers on the platform squad, not just their leadership, in refinement, in design discussions and in defect triage. The quality of this working relationship is the single biggest determinant of success in the role.
• Partner with the franchise and product squads that consume the platform, and hold the line on platform integrity under delivery pressure, balancing franchise urgency against consistent, scalable foundations.
• Work with Operations to understand how customers and accounts are actually onboarded and serviced, and bring that reality into platform decisions.
• Engage Finance, Data, Legal and Risk & Compliance early, so reporting needs, regulatory change and control expectations shape requirements rather than arriving as late constraints.
• Communicate platform and integration decisions in plain language to non-technical stakeholders, and in exacting detail to engineers. Both audiences should recognise the same decision.
• Use data to understand platform performance, and present roadmap and strategy to senior leadership, including the quarterly Technology Platform Playback attended by the CTO.

Interfaces & Boundaries

• The Product Lead, Core Banking Platform owns cross-book demand consolidation, investment business cases and prioritisation. This role supplies the platform substance those business cases rest on.
• The Vault Platform Product Manager owns the Vault implementation across the Bank and all product lines on it. This role owns the customer and account layer in front of it, and the two agree the seam between platform behaviour and product behaviour rather than each assuming it.
• Product Managers for each lending product line own their own product definition on Vault Core. This role owns the shared customer and account capability underneath them, and escalates cross-product-line trade-offs rather than resolving them locally.
• The Core Banking Delivery Lead and Engineering Manager own delivery sequencing and capacity. This role owns what is being built and why, and whether what was built is right.
• Data owns the Bank’s data architecture and governance. This role owns the customer record as a product and works within that architecture.

Essential