Product Manager

Job description

Product Manager VA Loan Guaranty (LGY) Program | Full-Time W-2 | Fully Remote (U.S.) The Problem We're Hiring You to Solve Every month, your product decisions reach Veterans buying homes, the lenders who close their loans, the servicers who manage them, and the VA staff who stand behind the guaranty. We are hiring a Product Manager for the modernization of the VA Loan Guaranty (LGY) technology portfolio. The job is translation under pressure: statute, policy, and a sprawling stakeholder ecosystem on one side, a backlog that ships to production every 30 days on the other, while a 20-year-old legacy platform keeps running until the modern one replaces it. If you can hold the Veteran, the lender, and the regulation in your head at the same time, keep reading. The Opportunity Most product roles let you invent demand. This one hands you something rarer: a product whose demand is guaranteed by law, which means every ounce of product discipline goes into making the experience better instead of making the funnel bigger. The LGY portfolio spans the loan guaranty lifecycle: origination-adjacent workflows, servicing oversight and loss mitigation, claims, housing grants, and analytics. The modern platform is Salesforce-centered and configuration-first, supplemented by serverless capabilities in a government cloud. Users include VA program staff and thousands of external lender and servicer users. The rhythm is fast and formal. Business needs enter through an intake process that produces an executable plan, with refined scope and level of effort, in days. Development runs on a monthly release cadence with an explicit quality bar: acceptance criteria sharp enough to support automated testing, defect detection above 95% before user acceptance testing, and accessibility built into every story. Your requirements are the first link in that quality chain. You will partner with an Enterprise Solution Architect who owns the designs, an Engineering Lead who owns delivery, and a DevSecOps Lead who owns the platform. You own what gets built, in what order, and why. What You'll Own The backlog as an instrument of the mission. Turn business needs and policy changes into refined, traceable user stories with acceptance criteria precise enough that engineers build the right thing and testers can automate against it. Intake to executable plan, fast. Drive new needs from raw business intent to a scoped, estimated, committed plan in days, working shoulder to shoulder with architecture and engineering. The roadmap across the portfolio. Sequence modernization, sustainment, and legacy decommissioning, and keep the roadmap credible enough that the customer plans against it. A stakeholder ecosystem, not a stakeholder. Balance VA program officials, field staff, and external lender and servicer users whose interests do not always align. Value in every release. Own prioritization so every 30-day release ships something stakeholders can name, and coordinate user acceptance testing that runs smoothly because the criteria were right from the start. The configure-versus-customize conversation. The program mandates configuration-first solutions. You represent the business value side of those tradeoffs and know when to fight for a custom exception. Decisions informed by data. Ground prioritization in analytics, usage, and operational metrics, and push for instrumentation where it does not exist yet. The transition experience. As functions move from legacy to modern, sequence the change so lenders, servicers, and VA staff are brought along rather than surprised. AI-Native Product Management AI is part of how PhoenixTeam works, and product management may have more to gain from it than any other discipline on the program. We are looking for someone who already uses AI tools as a working part of their practice: analyzing policy and regulation changes to extract requirements impacts in hours instead of weeks, drafting and stress-testing user stories before refinement, synthesizing stakeholder feedback into decision-ready themes, and keeping the backlog coherent as the portfolio grows. Judgment stays human. You know when AI output misreads a regulation or produces acceptance criteria that sound precise but are not. And boundaries are non-negotiable: federal environments govern what tools may touch government data and systems. Use AI wherever it creates leverage, and understand the security, data, privacy, and authorization boundaries governing where and how it can be used. What Great Looks Like Twelve months in, we would expect to see: Intake is fast and trusted. Needs move from raw intent to committed plans in days, and the customer trusts the scoping because it keeps proving accurate. Requirements stopped causing rework. Stories flow into development without churn, and ambiguity-driven defects trend toward zero. Every release has a headline. Stakeholders can name what shipped last month and why it mattered. UAT is uneventful. The business was engaged all along, not summoned at the end. The roadmap is the plan of record, and it survives policy changes because you built it to flex. AI is visibly part of your practice, with policy analysis, story drafting, and feedback synthesis running measurably faster. What You Bring We care about evidence more than resumes. Expect us to ask which products you have shaped, what your requirements looked like to the engineers who built from them, and how AI functions in your practice today. A product management record on complex enterprise software, with real users, real stakes, and outcomes rather than ceremonies. Housing finance domain fluency. You can hold your own with business stakeholders on day one. Depth in servicing, loss mitigation, or claims is especially relevant. Requirements craft. You write stories and acceptance criteria that engineers praise and testers can automate against. Federal delivery experience. You treat accessibility, security, and documentation as product constraints to design within, not obstacles to resent. Stakeholder range. You facilitate rooms spanning senior officials, field users, and engineers, and you can say no to a stakeholder and keep the relationship. Evidence-driven prioritization, with stated assumptions when data is thin. Demonstrated AI-in-the-loop practice you can show us concretely. Judgment under ambiguity. You make the call, document the reasoning, and own the outcome. U.S.-based, and able to obtain and maintain a federal Public Trust clearance. We do not screen on degrees or year counts. If your evidence is strong, we want to talk. Helpful, Not Required Direct experience with VA Loan Guaranty, VALERI, or other VA benefit programs. FHA, USDA rural housing, or GSE experience, or lender and servicer operations on the commercial side. Product work on Salesforce or a comparable configuration-first platform. Familiarity with MISMO, URLA, Jira and Confluence, or scaled agile. Leadership Expectations This role leads through the product. You set direction that architecture, engineering, and the customer align around, present recommendations to federal decision-makers with evidence, and challenge direction that will hurt the program or the Veteran, respectfully and early, including ours. Silent disagreement is a failure mode here, and so is the PM who relays stakeholder requests without shaping them. When priorities conflict, you make the call and own the outcome. This May Not Be the Role for You If... You may struggle here if you need someone else to translate policy into requirements, treat product management as ticket administration, avoid telling stakeholders no, wait for complete information before committing, treat compliance as friction rather than product requirements, view AI as a novelty, or stopped learning when you became senior. None of that makes someone a bad product manager. It makes them a bad fit for this particular job. Why PhoenixTeam You will be among people who speak your language. PhoenixTeam is a woman-owned small business founded and led by housing finance technologists who still do the work, with years embedded inside federal housing programs from loan guaranty to rural housing to mortgage insurance. Direct customer access. Your product judgment reaches the federal decision-makers who act on it. You shape the product, not just the backlog. You define how product management works on this program. AI-native is practice, not positioning. We fund ongoing AI education and development for the entire team. Fully remote, S.-based, permanently. Competitive salary and 100% employer-paid medical insurance. Mission you can explain at dinner. The product you shape supports the home loan benefit for the people who served this country. Position Requirements Full-time W-2 employment with PhoenixTeam. Must be based in the United States. Fully remote. Work supports the Department of Veterans Affairs Loan Guaranty Service (LGY). Must be able to obtain and maintain the required federal Public Trust clearance. A Secret clearance is not required. PhoenixTeam is a woman-owned small business focused on federal and commercial housing finance technology.