Product Partnership Manager

Thought Machine; New York (NY); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Thought Machine in New York is seeking a Product Partnerships Manager to drive the partnership strategy, identify opportunities, and expand the total addressable market by aligning with key banking and fintech partners.

You will manage partner relationships, shape product propositions, develop go-to-market motions, and coordinate commercial activities between Thought Machine and its partners, ensuring a cohesive, future-ready roadmap.

Qualifications

• Strong technical understanding of core banking and payments platforms.
• Experience evaluating partner solutions against a complex engineering roadmap.
• Deep knowledge of regional banking landscapes, regulation, and macro trends.
• Ability to link market trends to product opportunities for clients.
• Knowledge of ISV partners' technology, incentives, and priorities.
• Strong presentation skills to executives and senior stakeholders.
• Proven project management capabilities to track partnership activities.
• Excellent relationship and collaboration skills.

Responsibilities

• Identify product proposition opportunities with potential partners.
• Research and track core banking and payments issues relevant to partners.
• Track influential partners to strengthen market positioning.
• Create collateral and narratives for a better together story.
• Lead engagements with partners and ensure alignment with product direction.
• Run workshops with partners and demonstrate product evolution.
• Ensure partner solutions complement rather than duplicate internal roadmaps.
• Build go-to-market strategy and partnership plan with clear success criteria.
• Manage partner relationships and incentive programs with key stakeholders.

Skills

Core banking

Payments platforms

Cloud partnerships

Cloud-native architecture

Technical matchmaking

Executive communication

Project management

Stakeholder relationships

Education

Bachelor's degree in a related field

Job description

Thought Machine's mission is bold – to properly and permanently rid the world's banks of legacy technology. To achieve this, we have developed the foundations of modern banking through core and payments technology which run natively in the cloud. What we are attempting is hard and means we need great people working together to build great technology.

We have grown rapidly in the past few years – growing our team to more than 550 individuals across offices in London, New York, Singapore, Sydney and our newly established Engineering Hub in Lisbon. We have raised more than £500m in funding and our investors include Molten Ventures, Eurazeo, Intesa Sanpaolo, Temasek, Nyca Partners, JPMorgan Chase Strategic Investments, Standard Chartered Ventures, and more.

We have created a culture that enables our team to produce the best work in the industry while ensuring we have fun along the way. We're regularly cited as having a fantastic workplace culture and have been recognised by Sifted magazine as having one of the highest Glassdoor ratings for a UK fintech company and the industry's most generous employee share package. Named one of the world's most innovative fintechs by Global Finance Magazine, we were also recognised by the Financial Times as one of Europe's fastest-growing companies for two consecutive years—and a UK Best Employer for 2026.

The Product Partnerships Manager role is responsible for executing on the partnership strategy for expanding product capabilities and ultimately expanding the total addressable market and opportunities that our commercial team can capitalize on. The Product Partnerships Manager will be responsible for managing partnership relationships, shaping product propositions, executing on go-to-market motions, facilitating commercial activities between Thought Machine and the partner, developing our better together story, and tracking the success of the partnership initiatives.

Roles and Responsibilities

In the process of finalizing the roles and responsibilities for Product Partnerships Manager but can share the high level scope.

• Identify product proposition opportunities and the set of partners that could bring the opportunity to market.

• Research and track high-impact issues that banks face from a core and payments technology perspective as well as partner capabilities that best complement our product capabilities.

• Track the partners that have influence with commercial targets to find opportunities to strengthen our positioning with a prospect.

• Create and structure the necessary collateral and narrative for a better together story that highlight the customer problem we are solving, the combined capability set, and why our product proposition strengthen our overall value to the customer

• Lead engagements with partners developing proprietary assets to ensure all builds strictly complement our product direction.

• Ability to run low level workshops with partners, demoing with an understanding of the evolution and direction of our products.

• Ensure each partner solution enhances our product offering, rather than duplicating internal roadmaps and engineering efforts.

• Build the go-to-market strategy and partnership plan to ensure objectives, targets, and success criteria are collectively agreed upon and iterated upon when success is not met

• Manage relationships of partner organisations, identifying key incentive programs and ensuring that they bring the right stakeholders into builds that strictly complement the Thought Machine roadmap.

Required Experience and Skills

• Strong technical understanding of core banking, payment processing platforms, cloud service provider partnership experience, and/or cloud-native architecture and components that underlies the platform.

• You must be able to judge the technical fit of partner solutions against a complex. engineering roadmap and speak the language of both developers and C-Suite executives

• Thorough understanding of the region’s banking landscape from a competitor, macro-economic, and regulatory perspective as well as high value areas that our product can expand into.

• Keeps up with the latest market trends in technology and banking and is able to relate those news events in a way that is relevant to our product and the clients we serve.

• In-depth knowledge of our ISV partner’s technology, service offerings, incentives, and key priorities in order to best align from both a technology and commercial perspective

• Strong presentation skills and ability to present to client and partner executives and senior stakeholders

• Strong project management skills to track all of the partnership specific activities

• Strong relationship and interpersonal skills

We actively hire candidates who demonstrate technical excellence in their field and welcome people of all ages and backgrounds, providing everyone with equal access to professional development. You are encouraged to apply even if your experience doesn't accurately match the job description. We also encourage applications from those with different abilities, including candidates with ADHD, autism, dyslexia or dyspraxia.