Product Lead (Travel Heavy)

Column; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 220,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Fertility benefits via Carrot

Relocation/Commute assistance

Job summary

Column, a fintech-native bank and software company, is seeking a Product Lead to own strategic initiatives and core product areas. You’ll work without legacy baggage, acting as the GM of your domain while collaborating with senior leadership to drive growth and efficiency across the banking supply chain.

You’ll split time between the SF Presidio office and on-site engagements, traveling ~50% to partner with operators and customers, steering roadmaps, and delivering scalable solutions that

Qualifications

• 5+ years in product management at a high-growth tech company.
• Strong sense of software UX and customer value.
• Proven track record shipping products solving real problems.
• Business owner mindset: pricing, margins, and tradeoffs.
• Able to influence diverse stakeholders and align priorities.
• Highly organized, capable of running multiple workstreams.

Responsibilities

• Own product strategy, roadmap, and outcomes for key products.
• Identify bottlenecks to scale and design workflows to remove them.
• Decide build vs. buy for tooling and systems to enable automation.
• Spend time on-site with operators to inform product decisions.
• Own end-to-end execution, timelines, and cross-team accountability.

Skills

Product leadership

User-centric design

Shipping products

Pricing & P&L

Stakeholder alignment

Execution discipline

Willingness to travel

Fintech familiarity

Job description

About Column

For companies building financial technology and transforming the financial services space, the biggest bottleneck to their growth and innovation is often the underlying banks and infrastructure stack they rely on. We have spent our careers founding and scaling companies like Plaid, Square, Meta, Blend, and Affirm, and have seen this problem firsthand — builders and developers needing to partner with traditional banks, and creating API and abstraction layers over the patchwork that is the bank, its core, and many other vendors. All of this results in a complex (and often expensive) banking supply chain involving a user, fintech, BaaS middleware provider, bank, core and the Federal Reserve.

At Column, we set out to simplify and fix this. We are a bank and a software company built from the ground up, offering builders and developers technology-forward banking solutions that cut out the hundreds of vendors, middleware providers, and abstraction layers. This means a safer, more transparent, and less costly banking supply chain. Come build with us!

The opportunity

As a Product Lead at Column, you’ll help lay the foundation for the company’s next decade of growth. There's no existing roadmap to inherit, no legacy backlog, no "how we've always done it." You’ll own some of Column’s most important products and initiatives, with a heavy focus on designing the systems and tools that directly shape our ability to scale. You’ll act as the “GM” of your product area, owning everything from product strategy and requirements to internal platform development, while working alongside senior leadership at Column to take our business to the next level.

This position will be based in our San Francisco office in the Presidio, with regular travel throughout the United Sates. You can expect to be on the road 50%+ of the time, often embedded on-site for 2–4 weeks at a time.

What you’ll do

• Own the product strategy, roadmap and outcomes for key products

• Find the biggest bottlenecks to scale, then design and ship the products and workflows that remove them

• Drive decisions around “build vs. buy” strategies for new tooling and systems we need to drive automation and scale

• Spend time on-site with operators to understand workflows firsthand and turn what you learn into product decisions

• Own execution end to end, driving timelines, alignment and accountability on execution across the team

What you’ll need to be successful

• 5+ years of experience, including experience in product management at a high-growth technology company

• An understanding of what great software and exceptional user experiences look like

• A track record of shipping products that solved real operational or customer problems

• A business owner’s mindset. You’re as comfortable with pricing, margins, and P&L tradeoffs as you are with specs and roadmaps

• The ability to influence and align stakeholders with different priorities around a shared goal.

• A hyper-organized approach to execution. You’re comfortable running several workstreams across teams at once.

• Excitement about spending ~50% of your time on the road, embedded with the people and operations your products serve.

• A scrappy, roll-up-your-sleeves attitude. We thrive because we work harder, are more creative, and have zero ego when it comes to getting our hands dirty to build a business.

• Familiarity with banking or fintech is preferred but not required. An interest in becoming an expert in this space is a must.

What you'll get from us

• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision plans, including options that are 100% covered by Column for you and 100% covered for your dependents!

• Comprehensive family planning and fertility benefits via partnership with Carrot, including reimbursement of up to $20,000 in qualified expenses

• Up to $2,000 (post-tax) monthly rent subsidy for employees living within 2 miles of Column’s office

• FSA and HSA account options to enable use of pre-tax money for medical and dependent care expenses

• 401k plan, including self-directed brokerage options

• Flexible time-off policy - take the time off that you want and need to relax and recharge

• 100% paid parental leave, including 16 weeks for birth mothers, 12 weeks for primary caregivers, and 8 weeks for secondary caregivers

• Up to $4,500 in annual reimbursements for backup childcare

• Catered lunches and dinners for SF employees

• Commuter benefits, including paid transportation to-and-from the office

• Regular team building events, including annual offsite

Pay transparency:

Compensation packages at Column include base salary, equity, and benefits. New hire offers are made based on a candidate's experience, expertise, geographic location, and internal pay equity relative to peers.

The annual US base salary range for this role is $150,000 - $220,000 + equity.

We look forward to hearing from you

Column is committed to working with the best and brightest people from the broadest talent pool possible. We value bringing together a team with different perspectives, educational backgrounds, and life experiences, and believe a diversity of ideas is what allows us to develop the best solutions. All qualified individuals are encouraged to apply.

If you need assistance or a reasonable accommodation during the application and recruiting process, please reach out to [e-mail].

We participate in the E-Verify program in certain locations as required by law. Learn more about the E-Verify programhere.