Home Mortgage Product Strategy & Management

The Mortgage Product Development and Strategy Manager will drive the design, development, enhancements and strategic position of mortgage products to meet evolving market needs and organizational goals. This role will collaborate across internal stakeholders including Capital Markets, CRA, Credit Risk, Compliance, Legal, Marketing, Sales, Operations, and Technology to launch competitive, innovative, and customer-centric mortgage offerings. The position is responsible for lifecycle product management, market analysis, competitive benchmarking, strategic roadmap creation, and ensuring that products align with business objectives and regulatory/investor requirements.

Key Responsibilities & Duties:

• Define and own the residential mortgage product strategy for both common market products (GSE and Govie) and custom product solutions that drive differentiation 
• Lead the Community Development efforts for the business, monitoring and collaborating across Citizens to develop affordable solutions that help meet community needs and CRA commitments 
• Create a competitive advantage for Citizens through the development and successful commercialization of select proprietary products that offer unique and differentiated customer solutions that deliver enhanced margins and returns
• Continually push to understand customer needs and ensure the customer is considered in prioritization and trade-off discussions
• Drive products towards a meaningful balance between user needs, business objectives and technical feasibility
• Provide direction on the development, testing, and refinement of UX prototypes in a hybrid agile/waterfall environment
• Participate in Design Thinking, Agile, and LEAN rituals which establish rhythm for the team, promote ongoing communications, and iterative refinement of roadmaps 
• Serve as an intake of product, credit, and feature inputs from partners including Investor Relations, Capital Markets, Sales, Credit Risk, Operations and CRA
• Maintain a competitive assessment of product offerings by channel
• Identify customer gaps and innovate solutions that drive differentiation through features and/or custom product solutions
• Develop a product roadmap using internal/external inputs and rationalized through analytics & business cases
• Sponsor reporting and monitoring at the product level that provides actionable insights
• Set product performance expectations and drive change to our product and policy guidelines in response to risk appetite, competitive needs, investor changes, and risk controls
• Define and manage product requirements and go-to market plans, ensuring product and credit policy guidelines are fulsome, accurate, clear and compliant
• Manage overall product and policy change activities by maintaining an inventory through to implementation
• Serve as subject matter expert, contributing practitioner, thought leader, career guide, and mentor to the product development and credit admin teams (~10 FTE)
• Drive strong commercialization of launched programs and continuous product improvements through recurrent product review meetings with mortgage leadership and partners
• Partner with Investor Relations and Capital Markets for their role and responsibilities to support products and product strategy intersections, including:
  • on and off-balance sheet strategies
  • investor negotiations, contracts
  • execution and delivery strategies
  • pricing profitability
• Partner with Risk, Legal, Operations, Technology, Servicing, CRA, Market, and all areas where stakeholder intersections exist for transparency and fulsome change management

Skills:

• Excellent command of mortgage credit and residential products
• In-depth product risk knowledge, credit policies and investor requirements within secondary market, portfolio, sales and senior management
• Strong organizational and leadership skills: plans, reviews and tackle obstacles to excellence; ability to utilize persuasion and build relationships to win support for the benefit of the business
• Identifies product gaps and innovates solutions 
• Ability to work independently, manage a team of 10-15 FTE, and collaborate across the business line
• Strong Project Management discipline, with attention to detail and ability to manage multiple initiatives simultaneously
• Financial acumen to build business cases and monitoring results
• Builds confidence and inspires others to achieve success for the business 
• Excellent communication skills, both written and verbal, with the ability to effectively tell the story of the business to all internal and external stakeholders, including leaders at all levels within Citizens, regulatory agencies, and