Manager Product Innovation

Company Description

As part of the global product organization, Visa’s Innovation Group is a client facing organization that sets Visa’s public innovation agenda, supports new innovation opportunities, PoCs and product pilots, helping our clients accelerate their innovation agenda and transform their consumer digital experience. 

We promote hands on incubation and rapid prototyping to demonstrate the impact of new product concepts with consumers for clients and partners. Our group operates innovation teams and centers across many global locations; this function focuses on Visa’s Europe region.

Job Description

We are looking for a talented individual to lead and support our client partnered engagements and piloting programs supporting new product development projects. The individual should be able to work independently on large responsibilities within critical client or business projects. 

The successful candidate will be responsible for working across functions (e.g., design, technology, products, etc.) and with Visa’s client issuers, merchants, end consumers and partners. 

The Senior Manager will be responsible for specific human centered design and service or product design projects (from inception through pilot launch and testing). The role requires the person to be part of a holistic approach to product design that begins with the customer and rapidly iterates solutions to deliver customer experiences that are simple, powerful, and exceptional. 

In addition, the individual will be part of a team that brings a structured approach and the ability to communicate highly complex information to both technical and non-technical audiences. The team believes in curiosity, creative confidence, experimentation through making, continuous learning, respectful collaboration, inclusion, empathy, resiliency and fun! 

Lastly, the person should be a “SWAN” – someone who is smart, works hard, ambitious and nice!

• Work with clients and interdisciplinary teams of product, design, and engineering in the development of new use cases/pilots/PoCs, applying a digital-first mindset and the contemporary product management techniques of digital native companies (e.g., human centered design, minimum viable product, rapid prototyping, etc.
• Lead the business perspective on relevance to Visa, business modeling/case/reason to invest. Articulates the “Business Design Challenge” at the beginning of the project to ensure potential user and business impacts are relevant and defined early (e.g., what problem are we trying to solve? What impact do we want to have? What are possible solutions? What context and constraints do we need to keep in mind?)
• Participate in the delivery of a range of projects that could vary based on user, problem/opportunity defined 
• In partnership with design and technology determine what work should be done to explore, test, refine, and recommend a final solution and that brings a holistic approach to product design that begins with the customer and rapidly iterates solutions to deliver customer experiences that are simple, powerful, and exceptional. Work with designers + design technologist to make things tangible/real versus theoretical
• Demonstrate in-depth knowledge of Visa’s capabilities, payments, commerce ecosystem, think holistically about the design of a new offering and the implications related to both the customer’s experience as well as the organization’s ability to implement and scale. This includes working closely with our partners to develop strategies, timelines, and operational models that appropriately consider the organizational needs, aspirations, business realities
• Articulate the desirability, viability and feasibility of recommendations. This includes crafting the story of how the design recommendation fits into a company’s overall strategy, the underlying business model, and any implementation risks.
• Lead client engagements end-to-end (from selling, scoping, research, client delivery and go-to-market) supporting new product pilots and PoC launch, test and learn cycles
• Lead immersions to gain business, ecosystem insights
  • Define, design, and execute research and analytics for opportunity szing
  • Lead synthesis and summarizing of content for executive audiences and for product roadmaps
• Take leadership of project, team, and client relationship
  • Lead and inspire large and diverse teams of 10-20 client + Visa staff during client co-creation sprints, providing clear vision, direction, and allocating roles based on skills, strengths and need
  • Coordinate support and inputs required from Visa Sales team, senior team members and Visa SMEs 
  • Coordinate with Innovation Ops team logistics of client engagements
  • Active facilitation of co-creation in person & virtual workshops
  • Run go to market for PoC and pilot sprints with optimization support
• Use exceptional project management, facilitation and leadership skills to inspire the joint Visa + client / partner team to deliver their best
• Energize and improve the status quo using creativity and intelligent, calculated risks to deliver new products and processes that surpass clients’ expectations, demonstrating new methods, capabilities, and mindsets.
• Establish compelling business-based reason for change that mobilizes others to adopt new product development process that more effectively and rapidly deliver growth and improve Visa’s competitive differentiation.
• Embrace opportunity to develop appropriate process/approach based on each project including setting up parameters that feel defined but not overly restrictive

This role will report into the Senior Director of Product Innovation, Europe and will be based in Berlin, with significant exposure to key stakeholders and leadership across Visa Inc. This position will require frequent travel to client sites and Visa locations in Europe.

This is a hybrid position. Hybrid employees can alternate time between both remote and office. Employees in hybrid roles are expected to work from the office 2-3 set days a week (determined by leadership/site), with a general guidepost of being in the office 50% or more of the time based on business needs.

Qualifications

• MBA or equivalent degree
• 8+ years of experience in commerce & payments (card/non card), new product design, or financial services product development
• Banking, fintech, merchant/acquirer side experience required
• Product design/development experience, with a strong track record in innovative new product development, scaling pilots to commercialization
• Highly skilled at data informed business case modeling and opportunity sizing, well versed in market research and business analytics
• Expertise in innovation and product development methodologies from applied human centred design to service design, and agile (SAFe) scrum
• Must have a mindset that embraces creativity, optimism, ambiguity and failing-fast
• Comfortable interacting, interviewing and iterating with people through exploration of new concept, prototyping (low and high) and testing
• Strategy or innovation or digital consulting experience a plus
• Proven ability to work on complex and often ambiguous problems, to drive early commercial results
• Ability to be client-facing, specifically to design, facilitate and execute on complex client engagements and pilot sprints
• Proven ability executing go-to-market for new product pilots with OKR and optimization strategies

Additional Information

All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.