[Hiring] Forward Deployed Product Manager @Global Payments Inc.

Role Description

Active Network is hiring a Forward Deployed Product Manager to lead one of our most strategic, single-customer engagements: a large, multi-module platform build on ACTIVEWorks Endurance for a leading global endurance and obstacle-race event organizer and its family of brands. This is a builder’s role — equal parts embedded customer partner and hands-on product owner. You’ll sit shoulder-to-shoulder with the client, become the connective tissue between their business and our engineering organization, and own delivery across registration, payments, race passes, dynamic pricing, on-site race-day operations, identity, APIs/webhooks, and reporting.

Unlike a traditional portfolio PM, you’ll be dedicated to a single customer and deployed into their world. You’ll learn their business deeply, translate race-day realities into platform requirements, and drive a complex, phased roadmap to firm delivery milestones — an initial launch followed by a subsequent phase of enhancements. At the same time, you remain a rigorous product owner: writing epics and user stories, grooming the backlog, and coordinating the 2–3 development teams that turn the Statement of Work into shipped software.

What Part Will You Play?

• Embed & Partner
  • Be the forward-deployed product lead — embed with the customer, build trust, and become their day-to-day product point of contact for the engagement.
  • Run discovery and requirements sessions directly with client stakeholders; surface the real need behind each ask, resolve ambiguity, and drive decisions.
  • Translate high-level client objectives and race-day operational realities into clear, measurable functional requirements.
  • Communicate relentlessly — progress, risks, trade-offs, and evolving requirements — to both the customer and internal leadership throughout the project lifecycle.
• Own the Product & Backlog
  • Define, drive, and maintain the roadmap and backlog for the engagement across both delivery phases — an initial launch and a follow-on phase of enhancements.
  • Write clear epics, user stories, and acceptance criteria from a detailed SOW spanning registration and checkout, payments and split settlement, dynamic pricing, race passes, transfers, on-site/race-day operations, identity/SSO, APIs/webhooks, and reporting.
  • Prioritize ruthlessly — sequence initial feature development and ongoing change requests against firm delivery deadlines.
  • Manage scope against the SOW — identify change requests, quantify their impact on estimate and timeline, and partner with account and delivery leadership to keep the engagement on track.
• Coordinate Delivery
  • Quarterback 2–3 development teams — align sprint goals, manage cross-team dependencies, and orchestrate release sequencing across interdependent modules.
  • Prepare release objectives, milestones, and schedules with engineering, project management, design, and QA across all phases of development and launch.
  • Partner with Business Analysts and designers to ensure designs and builds meet documented requirements and customer needs.
  • Coordinate complex, cross-functional areas — Stripe payments and split settlement, international/multi-currency and VAT/GST, and data and reporting delivered via ACTIVE Hub.
  • Drive launch readiness — support UAT, cutover planning, and post-launch stabilization for race-day-critical functionality.
  • Act as quarterback of the team and business owner for the overall solution.

Qualifications

• 4+ years in a product management or product owner role
• Bachelor’s degree
• Embedded / customer-facing experience — prior forward-deployed, solutions, professional-services, or client-embedded PM work strongly preferred
• Proven track record of delivering complex software projects on time, on quality, and on budget
• Demonstrated experience writing epics, user stories, and functional requirements in an agile environment
• Experience coordinating multiple concurrent development teams and managing cross-team dependencies
• Exposure to SaaS and ecommerce product development; comfort with payments, APIs/webhooks, and third-party integrations
• Excellent communication skills, both verbal and written — able to be the trusted face of the product to an external customer
• Strong business acumen and the ability to translate client objectives into measurable requirements
• Ability to communicate effectively with different personalities and roles (development, sales, support, customer, analyst, executive) and build strong relationships

What Are Our Desired Skills and Capabilities?

• Experience in registration, ticketing, events, or endurance/obstacle-course racing (OCR)
• Familiarity with payment processing and split settlement (e.g., Stripe Connect)
• Experience with international commerce, multi-currency, and VAT/GST compliance
• Experience with BI/reporting platforms (Power BI, SQL-based data warehouses)
• Pragmatic Institute (Pragmatic Marketing) Certified
• B2B2C experience
• A passion for endurance sports