Product Manager Consultant

Job Title: Product Manager Consultant – Debt Platform Modernization
Location: Jersey City, NJ (Onsite)
About the Company: The Funding Corporation is a crucial component of the U.S. agricultural financial system. It serves as the fiscal and disclosure agent for the Farm Credit System, raising funds by issuing high-quality debt securities in the financial markets. The debt raised supports loans, leases, and operations that help American farmers, agribusinesses, and rural communities thrive.

As part of a cooperative system, we are committed to equitable participation, environmental stewardship, and strong community relationships, ensuring that the agricultural sector has consistent access to financial resources.

About the Role: We are seeking an experienced Product Manager consultant to support the Debt Platform Modernization program. The consultant will work with business stakeholders, subject-matter experts, technology partners, developers, and test engineers to define end-to-end business flows and translate them into implementable product requirements. This hands-on role is accountable for maintaining a delivery-ready backlog, supporting implementation and testing, conducting product reviews, and helping ensure that delivered capabilities meet agreed business outcomes and acceptance criteria.

Key Responsibilities:
·         Stakeholder Engagement and Discovery: Facilitate working sessions with internal business stakeholders, subject-matter experts, external partners, and delivery teams to document current-state and future-state business flows, clarify decisions, identify dependencies, and obtain timely alignment on requirements.

·         Product Planning and Backlog Management: Partner with Product leadership to translate program priorities into a sequenced product backlog, maintain dependencies and release scope, and keep features and user stories ready for development and testing.

·         Business Flow and Requirements Definition: Define end-to-end business processes, workflows, business rules, data needs, exception scenarios, and integration touchpoints. Translate approved requirements into clear epics, features, user stories, process flows, and acceptance criteria that development and test engineering teams can implement and validate.

·         Testing and Acceptance: Partner with test engineering to review test scenarios and traceability to acceptance criteria, clarify expected behavior and business rules, support defect triage, coordinate business validation, and recommend whether completed functionality is ready for product acceptance.

·         Cross-Functional Delivery: Work closely with developers, architects, test engineers, business analysts, Finance, Operations, and external delivery partners throughout refinement, implementation, testing, and release preparation. Lead regular product reviews and demonstrations, capture feedback and decisions, resolve requirement questions, and confirm that delivered capabilities align with approved business flows and acceptance criteria.

·         Debt Markets and Domain Understanding: Develop a working understanding of debt issuance, settlement, and related operational processes. Use this knowledge, together with stakeholder

input and relevant market practices, to challenge assumptions, identify process gaps, and support informed product decisions.

·         User Experience and Process Design: Collaborate with business users and design resources to develop and review process flows, wireframes, and prototypes in Figma. Ensure proposed experiences support efficient, controlled, and intuitive workflows for internal and external users.

Expected Deliverables: Documented current-state and future-state business flows; well-defined epics, features, user stories, business rules, and acceptance criteria; reviewed wireframes or prototypes; maintained requirements and decision documentation; a prioritized and delivery-ready backlog; product-review materials and feedback records; and timely clarification and acceptance support throughout development and testing.

Candidate Submission Expectations: The vendor should provide examples of comparable product-management engagements and summarize the candidate’s direct experience defining complex business flows, writing implementation-ready user stories, using Figma, JIRA, Confluence, and Smartsheet, partnering with development and test engineering teams, and supporting product reviews and acceptance. Candidates whose experience is primarily project coordination or program reporting will not meet the needs of this role.

Qualifications:
·         Experience: 7 or more years of hands-on product management, product ownership, or business-process design experience supporting complex technology implementations. Experience in financial services, capital markets, debt issuance, trade lifecycle, or securities settlement is strongly preferred.

·         Education: Bachelor’s degree in Business, Finance, Information Systems, Computer Science, or a related field, or equivalent relevant professional experience.

·         Delivery and Tool Proficiency: Demonstrated ability to create process flows, epics, features, user stories, acceptance criteria, wireframes, and product-review materials for complex platforms. Proficiency with JIRA and Confluence is required; working experience with Figma and Smartsheet is expected. Experience collaborating with Agile development and test engineering teams through refinement, implementation, testing, and release is required.

·         Skills: Strong facilitation, written and verbal communication, analytical thinking, and stakeholder-management skills. The candidate must be able to bring structure to ambiguous problems, document decisions clearly, manage competing priorities, challenge assumptions constructively, and independently drive assigned product work to completion.

·         Preferred Domain Experience: Experience with debt issuance, fixed-income products, trade lifecycle, securities settlement, financial controls, or regulated financial-services platforms is preferred.