Product Owner

Hands-on Fractional Product Owner for payments and telehealth to drive discovery, define requirements, and deliver solutions for high-risk telehealth merchants; remote contract with potential transition to full-time.

Responsibilities

• Perform market research on the telehealth payments landscape, including competitors, processor options, sponsor bank appetite, card brand posture, and underserved gaps
• Conduct interviews with telehealth merchants, prospective merchants, underwriting analysts, risk officers, and sales teams; translate insights into actionable product direction
• Assess needs and prioritize by turning discovery into a written roadmap with bets, trade-offs, and success metrics
• Define requirements and write user stories for engineering, covering onboarding flows, underwriting automation, risk decisioning, compliance review, and reporting
• Draft product specifications for AI and LLM driven automation in website review, document review, and underwriting triage
• Collaborate with compliance to ensure requirements align with Visa, Mastercard, and sponsor bank rules for telehealth and high-risk verticals

Requirements

• 7+ years in product management or product ownership with deep experience in payments processing or merchant acquiring (ISO, payfac, processor, gateway, or sponsor bank)
• Direct experience in the telemedicine vertical, including DTC telehealth, compounded medications, GLP-1s, hormone therapy, mental health, and peptides, with the related payments, regulatory, and chargeback dynamics
• High-risk merchant underwriting fluency covering MATCH/TMF, chargeback thresholds, reserves, MCC restrictions, prohibited verticals, and the underwriting documentation cycle
• Proven discovery capabilities with structured user interviews, market research, and competitive analysis; artifacts such as interview guides, synthesis docs, and opportunity assessments from prior roles
• Strong needs-assessment instincts to take a vague problem, perform discovery, and deliver a written recommendation on what to build and what not to build
• Experience crafting crisp specifications and user stories; comfortable leading Agile or Scrum ceremonies

Technologies

• JIRA for backlog management, sprint planning, epic/story hierarchy, custom workflows, and JQL reporting
• Confluence or Notion for product documentation, PRDs, and decision logs
• Figma for reviewing design files and sketching low-fidelity wireframes
• Miro, FigJam, Lucidchart for journey mapping and discovery diagrams
• SQL for validating assumptions and pulling cohort data
• AI native workflow with LLMs such as Claude and ChatGPT for drafting specs and synthesizing notes
• API literacy to read REST docs and translate into engineer-ready requirements
• User research tools like Dovetail, Grain, Otter for interview capture and synthesis
• Roadmapping tools such as Productboard or Aha!

Strongly Preferred

• Familiarity with TSYS, First Data, or Fiserv style processor back-ends
• Experience with internal CRM and onboarding systems (Salesforce or custom platforms)
• Exposure to AI or LLM driven automation in underwriting or compliance review
• Working knowledge of card brand integrity programs (Visa VIRP/VAMP/VDMP, Mastercard BRAM/ECP)
• Understanding of telehealth regulatory landscape (FDA, FTC, state medical boards, Ryan Haight Act, DEA scheduling, compounding rules)
• Prior fractional or advisory work showing effectiveness on limited hours

How you operate

• Discovery first approach: engage users before writing specs
• Direct communicator who can push back without burning relationships
• Comfort with ambiguity and delivering a written recommendation by the end of the week
• Bias for action and avoidance of analysis paralysis
• Strong written communication producing artifacts such as interview syntheses, opportunity briefs, specs, and decision logs

Rate Info

Rate: USD 70 - 90 per hour, based on W2 or 1099/C2C. Rates are negotiable. This is a contract engagement with potential transition to full-time.