Product Manager, Checkout

Purpose and mission

The Product Manager (PM) is the strategic owner of one or multiple product areas within Piano's portfolio. The PM translates business goals, market signals, and client insights into a compelling product vision and a prioritized program backlog. They work at the intersection of business strategy, client value, product marketing, product design and technology feasibility, ensuring that the right things get built, in the right order, for the right reasons.

In the SAFe 6 model, the PM operates at the Agile Release Train level, driving the Program Increment (PI) and empowering Product Owners to execute with confidence and autonomy.

In an AI-accelerated product landscape, a PM at Piano is expected to actively leverage AI tools to sharpen market analysis, accelerate discovery, generate insights from data, and move faster at every stage of the product lifecycle. AI fluency is not optional, it is a force multiplier for every other responsibility in this role.

The Checkout PM owns Piano's customer-facing checkout surface — the conversion-critical flow where end users make a subscription purchase. This role requires a PM who is fluent in conversion optimization and UX.

Core responsibilities

1. Product Vision & Strategy
   

• Define and maintain a clear, compelling product vision for Piano's checkout, aligned with Piano's broader subscription strategy.

• Develop and own the checkout roadmap over a 3–12 month horizon, balancing new capabilities, technical quality, and business priorities.

• Conduct ongoing market and competitive analysis to identify opportunities, threats, and strategic positioning — particularly at the boundary between Piano's checkout and payment provider capabilities.

• Define and communicate product positioning, target segments, and go-to-market priorities in collaboration with Marketing and Sales.

1. Backlog Ownership at Program Level
   

• Own and maintain the checkout Program Backlog (Features and Enablers) in collaboration with Product Leadership, Architects and other PMs.

• Prioritize features using value-based frameworks (WSJF, RICE, business impact, strategic fit) and maintain a rolling, well-groomed backlog at all times.

• Lead PI Planning preparation for checkout: define PI Objectives, present the roadmap to the ART, and make prioritization decisions during planning.

• Validate Feature acceptance criteria before development begins and approve Features upon delivery.

1. Stakeholder Alignment & Communication
   

• Serve as the primary voice of the customer and the market within the ART for checkout-related work, translating needs into Features the team can act on.

• Collaborate closely with Sales, Pre-Sales, Customer Success, and Support to gather and synthesize client feedback and market signals.

• Communicate the roadmap and strategic priorities clearly and consistently to all relevant stakeholders, including executive leadership.

• Represent the product in customer-facing contexts: executive meetings, key account workshops, conferences and strategic partnership discussions.

1. Business & Performance Management
   

• Define and monitor checkout product KPIs and OKRs, with particular focus on conversion metrics, completion rates, and revenue impact.

• Conduct product ROI analysis to justify investment decisions and support budget and resource discussions.

• Manage the checkout product lifecycle from inception to end-of-life, making proactive portfolio decisions in collaboration with Product Leadership.

1. Go-to-Market & Launch
   

• Lead the go-to-market strategy for new checkout capabilities and major releases: beta programs, internal training, sales enablement, and release communication.

• Collaborate with Marketing and PMM teams to produce effective product messaging and promotional materials.

• Define and oversee the internal release process to ensure teams are prepared before customer-facing delivery.

Collaboration model

The PM does not work in isolation. Success in this role depends on effective collaboration:

• With Product Owners: PMs provide strategic context, prioritized Features, and clear acceptance criteria. POs translate these into actionable stories. The PM should be a trusted partner and enabler for POs, not a bottleneck.

• With Product Leadership (at the ART and Portfolio levels): PMs are accountable for roadmap quality and strategic alignment. Key decisions on scope, investment, and positioning are made in close consultation with Product Leadership.

• With Architecture & Engineering: PMs work with Architects to understand technical constraints and enablers. Technical feasibility informs prioritization and roadmap planning.

• With Product Design: The PM sets the user experience ambition, defining the problems to solve, the user outcomes to target, and the quality bar expected. For checkout, conversion impact is a core input to design decisions.

• With Customer Success, Consulting & Support: The PM ensures proactive knowledge transfer before releases, clear internal documentation, and well-defined escalation processes, so that client-facing teams can resolve issues and answer questions with confidence, without systematically falling back on Product.

• With GTM teams: PMs are responsible for enabling Sales, Pre-Sales, and Marketing to confidently present and sell the product at all times.

What success looks like

• The checkout roadmap is clear, up-to-date, and well understood by all stakeholders.

• PI Objectives are ambitious yet realistic and are consistently met or exceeded.

• Product Owners feel empowered, well-informed, and able to operate autonomously.

• Checkout drives measurable business value: conversion rates, completion rates, revenue impact, and client satisfaction.

• The team builds the right things, validated by client outcomes, not just delivery volume.

• Field teams (Pre-sales, Sales, Client success…) are informed ahead of releases, equipped with the right materials, and feel like active contributors to the product roadmap, not just recipients of it.

• Strategic changes and trade-offs are communicated proactively and with confidence.

Key competences

Hard skills

• Domain expertise in checkout, payments, and subscription commerce

• Hands-on experience with Stripe strongly preferred

• Front-end product instinct and design sensibility (for working closely with design and engineering on user-facing surfaces)

• Market & competitive intelligence

• Product strategy & roadmapping

• Business case development & ROI analysis

• Scrum, SAFe and Agility at scale

• Data-driven decision making

• Working proficiency in English
• AI-augmented product practices (discovery, analysis, synthesis, prototyping, internal tooling)

Required experience

• Demonstrated PM experience leading customer-facing checkout, payments, or subscription purchase surfaces

• Track record of measurable conversion or revenue improvements through checkout iteration

• Experience working in or alongside payment provider ecosystems (Stripe experience strongly preferred)
• Understanding of subscription lifecycle economics preferred — how checkout decisions affect not just conversion but downstream retention, LTV, and recurring revenue

Employment & benefits

• B2B contract
  
• Hybrid work model
• Benefits: 20 days of paid leave, Lunch Card, Luxmed