Product Owner – – Payments and Healthcare
Product Owner – Payments and Healthcare
- Remote contract opportunity
- 20-30 hrs a week, can turn into full time in the future
We need a hands-on Fractional Product Owner who lives at the intersection of payments processing and telemedicine. You'll own discovery, requirements, and delivery for products serving telehealth merchants — DTC platforms, hormone therapy, mental health, compounded medications, and similar verticals that sit squarely in the high-risk payments category.
This is a discovery-heavy role. We're not looking for someone to manage an existing backlog — we're looking for someone who can go find out what to build: talk to merchants, talk to our internal underwriting, and risk teams, study the competitive and regulatory landscape, and come back with prioritized, well-scoped product bets.
What you will own
- Market research on the telehealth payments landscape — competitors, processor offerings, sponsor bank appetite, card brand posture, and where the underserved gaps are
- User interviews with telehealth merchants, prospective merchants, underwriting analysts, risk officers, and sales — and the synthesis that turns those conversations into product direction
- Needs assessment and prioritization — translating discovery into a written roadmap with clear bets, trade-offs, and success metrics
- Requirements and user stories for the engineering team — onboarding flows, underwriting automation, risk decisioning, compliance review, and reporting
- Product specs for AI/LLM-driven automation in website review, document review, and underwriting triage
- Partnering with compliance on requirements driven by Visa, Mastercard, and sponsor bank rules for telehealth and high-risk verticals
Required experience
- 7+ years in product management or product ownership, with deep time in payments processing or merchant acquiring (ISO, payfac, processor, gateway, or sponsor bank)
- Direct experience in the telemedicine vertical — DTC telehealth, compounded medications, GLP-1s, hormone therapy, mental health, peptides — and the unique payments, regulatory, and chargeback dynamics these merchants face
- High-risk merchant underwriting fluency — MATCH/TMF, chargeback thresholds, reserves, MCC restrictions, prohibited verticals, and the underwriting documentation cycle
- Demonstrated discovery chops — you've run structured user interview programs, market research, and competitive analysis, and you can show artifacts (interview guides, synthesis docs, opportunity assessments) from prior roles
- Strong needs-assessment instincts — you can sit with a vague problem (“our telehealth onboarding is slow”), do the discovery, and come back with a written recommendation on what's worth building and what isn't
- Comfortable writing crisp specs and user stories; experience running Agile/Scrum ceremonies
Technical skills & tooling
- JIRA — fluent in backlog management, sprint planning, epic/story hierarchy, custom workflows, and JQL for reporting
- Confluence (or Notion) — comfortable building and maintaining product documentation, PRDs, and decision logs
- Figma — able to read, comment on, and collaborate inside design files; can sketch low-fi wireframes to communicate intent (you don't need to be a designer, but you shouldn't need one to express an idea)
- Miro / FigJam / Lucidchart — for journey mapping, workflow diagrams, and discovery synthesis
- SQL fluency — can write your own queries to validate assumptions, pull cohort data, and check whether features are actually being used; not dependent on analysts for basic answers
- AI-native workflow — actively using LLMs (Claude, ChatGPT, etc.) in your day-to-day product work — drafting specs, synthesizing interview notes, competitive scans, summarizing call transcripts
- API literacy — can read API docs, understand REST/webhook patterns, and write requirements that engineers don't have to translate
- User research tools — familiarity with Dovetail, Grain, Otter, or similar for interview capture and synthesis is a plus
- Roadmapping — Productboard, Aha!, or equivalent
Strongly preferred
- Familiarity with TSYS, First Data/Fiserv, or similar processor back-ends
- Experience with internal CRM and onboarding systems (Salesforce or custom platforms)
- Exposure to AI/LLM-driven automation in underwriting or compliance review
- Working knowledge of card brand integrity programs (Visa VIRP/VAMP/VDMP, Mastercard BRAM/ECP)
- Understanding of the telehealth regulatory landscape (FDA, FTC, state medical boards, Ryan Haight Act, DEA scheduling, compounding rules)
- Prior fractional or advisory work — you know how to be effective on limited hours
How you operate
- Discovery-first: you talk to users before you write specs
- Direct communicator who can push back without burning relationships
- Comfortable in ambiguity — can turn a half-defined problem into a written recommendation by end of week
- Bias for action; allergic to analysis paralysis
- Strong written communication — most of your output is artifacts (interview synthesis, opportunity briefs, specs, decision docs)
Rate Info:
Targeting between $70-$90/hr based on W2 or 1099/C2C. Rates are negotiable.