Director, Insurance Product Management

Aspida is a tech-driven, nimble insurance carrier backed by Ares Management Corporation, a leading global alternative asset manager. We offer simple and secure retirement solutions and annuity products with speed and precision, focusing on protecting the dreams of our partners, producers, and clients. Our suite of products provides secure, stable retirement solutions with attractive features and downside protection through an elegant and intuitive digital platform.

About the role

The Director, Insurance Product Management is responsible for the execution and delivery oversight of internal insurance systems and operational capabilities that support annuity insurance. This role partners with business, technology, operations, actuarial, compliance, data, finance, and vendor teams to shape insurance systems strategy and vision, ensuring roadmaps are executed effectively and priorities are managed across teams.

This role directs execution across the full portfolio of insurance systems areas, including roadmap management, stakeholder coordination, prioritization, requirements oversight, backlog management, delivery partnership, business readiness, and continuous improvement. The position is accountable for the day-to-day management of a team of Product Managers, ensuring consistent execution, timely delivery, and resolution of cross-team dependencies across core administration, servicing, workflow, document, data exchange, and related insurance systems capabilities.

The ideal candidate is a hands-on, execution-focused leader who thrives in a fast-paced environment, can manage a portfolio of concurrent initiatives through their team, and is comfortable navigating complex operational, technical, and organizational challenges. This role reports to the VP of Technology and requires onsite presence 3 days a week at our Durham, NC headquarters.

Responsibilities

• Manage execution of the roadmap across all assigned insurance systems and operational capability areas, ensuring priorities are delivered on schedule and issues are resolved quickly.
• Manage, coach, and hold accountable a team of Product Managers, overseeing their day-to-day work on roadmap execution, stakeholder management, prioritization, and delivery.
• Partner with stakeholders across Operations, Actuarial, Accounting, Compliance, Distribution, Technology, Finance, Data, and external vendors to coordinate priorities, resolve cross-system dependencies, and keep delivery on track.
• Work with business teams and leaders to inform insurance systems strategy and vision for assigned areas, ensuring execution stays aligned with evolving business direction.
• Oversee discovery and requirements-gathering efforts across the portfolio, ensuring teams surface and address operational pain points, exception paths, downstream impacts, and automation opportunities.
• Review and approve how business needs are translated into product requirements, business rules, workflows, acceptance criteria, and delivery-ready backlog items across teams.
• Own day-to-day tradeoff decisions across new capabilities, pre-committed servicing needs, operational defects, vendor constraints, technical debt, staffing/resourcing, and business readiness.
• Provide direct oversight of backlog refinement across insurance systems and capability areas, ensuring consistency and quality in epics, features, stories, acceptance criteria, and release priorities.
• Represent the product organization in planning, delivery reviews, release readiness, and post-release stabilization discussions with engineering, QA, data, operations, and vendor teams.
• Manage business readiness execution, including training rollout, UAT/BAT coordination, operational procedure updates, stakeholder sign-off, and adoption tracking across the insurance systems portfolio.
• Manage triage and escalation of production issues, defects, enhancement requests, and operational escalations based on business impact, risk, urgency, and priority.
• Track and report on portfolio-level delivery metrics, such as processing efficiency, cycle time, accuracy, automation, quality, compliance readiness, service effectiveness, and system adoption.
• Manage vendor relationships and coordinate contract/renewal discussions relevant to insurance systems, in partnership with Finance and Procurement.
• Ensure consistent quality, completeness, and sound judgment across the product management team in a fast-paced environment with shifting business needs and multiple concurrent priorities.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Computer Information Technology, Business, a related field, or equivalent professional experience.
• Minimum of 12-14+ years of experience in product management, product ownership, business analysis, or related enterprise application functions, including experience directly managing a team.
• Demonstrated experience managing, coaching, and holding accountable Product Managers or similar product/business analysis professionals.
• Experience working within financial services, insurance, annuities, life insurance, or related highly regulated industries.
• Experience managing delivery for enterprise applications, operational systems, policy administration, servicing, workflow, document generation, integrations, data exchange, or related insurance business capabilities across multiple teams.
• Strong understanding of software delivery processes and proven experience managing execution in Agile or iterative development environments.
• Ability to manage a portfolio of concurrent priorities in a fast-paced environment with shifting business needs, limited capacity, and cross-functional/cross-team dependencies.
• Demonstrated ability to partner with business leaders on strategy and vision for insurance systems areas, and translate that direction into actionable, executable roadmaps.
• Experience partnering with and coordinating cross-functional business and technical teams, including Operations, Accounting, Actuarial, Compliance, Data, Finance, Distribution, Engineering, and external vendors.
• Experience supporting annuity or life insurance products, policy administration systems, insurance operations, or regulated financial services systems strongly preferred.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with the ability to guide investigation of system behavior, operational workflows, financial outputs, data issues, integration failures, and production defects.
• Experience working with APIs, batch processing, integrations, extracts, enterprise workflows, data validation, or downstream system dependencies.
• Ability to oversee the definition, refinement, and prioritization of epics, features, user stories, business rules, acceptance criteria, and business readiness needs across a team.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills with the ability to coordinate across stakeholders and translate between business and technology audiences.
• Ability to manage competing priorities, exercise sound judgment, and drive team execution to completion with minimal oversight.

Benefits

• Salaried position with Direct Ownership Equity Long-Term Incentive Plan (DOE).
• Full-time role with a comprehensive benefits package.

We value inclusivity and welcome candidates from diverse backgrounds, including non-traditional paths. Unique experiences enrich our team, and the willingness to dream big makes you an exceptional candidate.