Appian Forward Deployed Product Owner (Bond Management)
Wilmington Trust · Remote · $148,300–$247,100 (stated in the posting)
Overview:
The Wilmington Trust Institutional Services (IS) division is experiencing rapid business growth and has initiated a strategic digital transformation program. The goals of the program are to grow revenue through new and transformed digital-first trust and agency service products, to move from a product-centric to client-centric operating model, to move from market-specific to global solutions, and to dramatically lower the cost to serve.
Wilmington Trust is seeking an Appian Forward Deployed Product Owner to accelerate the modernization of Bond Management capabilities and the operational workflows supporting Corporate Trust products and services. This role is designed for an experienced product, business analysis, or transformation professional who can operate close to business users, translate operational needs into deployable digital workflows, and help lead iterative delivery in a regulated financial services environment.
This role combines Product Ownership, business process transformation, and hands-on Appian workflow design responsibilities within a regulated financial services environment. The role requires hands-on Appian experience, strong business process and analytical skills, and the ability to partner across business, operations, technology, risk, and product stakeholders to move quickly from discovery to working solutions.
Ideal candidates will be comfortable owning product outcomes, facilitating working sessions, writing stories and specifications, validating build quality, and using AI-assisted tools to accelerate analysis, documentation, prototyping, testing, and workflow improvement.
Primary Responsibilities:
- Design, configure, and improve business process workflows using Appian Designer, with a focus on speed to value, user-centric design, reuse, governance, and operational control.
- Lead business process discovery across Bond Management operations, including debt servicing, transfer agent, paying agent, waterfall accounting, and exception management processes.
- Identify automation opportunities, document current state pain points, and establish baseline measures for effort, cycle time, exception volume, straight-through processing, and control effectiveness.
- Define value hypotheses, business outcomes, and success measures to guide workflow prioritization, backlog decisions, and benefit realization.
- Apply Appian to modernize Bond Management workflows across debt servicing, transfer agent, paying agent, waterfall accounting, exception management, and related operational control processes.
- Partner closely with business product owners, operations leaders, technology teams, and risk partners to gather requirements, map processes, define user needs, and prioritize workflow improvements.
- Own and manage product backlog items, including authoring, refining, and grooming user stories, acceptance criteria, specifications, process flows, UI concepts, test scenarios, and release-ready requirements.
- Lead stakeholder working sessions to define current-state and future-state workflows, identify friction points, iterate on MVP designs, resolve issues, and drive alignment across business and technology teams.
- Build, configure, and maintain workflows in Appian Designer, leveraging out-of-the-box components wherever possible to accelerate delivery, support consistency, and reduce the need for custom development.
- Use AI-assisted and agentic AI tools to accelerate discovery, process analysis, requirements documentation, story drafting, workflow prototyping, test case generation, defect analysis, and delivery communications.
- Own assigned Bond Management workflow outcomes from discovery through configuration, validation, pilot adoption, and post release optimization; establish baselines and measure realized improvements in straight-through processing, exception volume, cycle time, manual effort, control effectiveness, and user adoption.
- Support QA, UAT, regression testing, and production validation by defining test scenarios, validating builds, documenting defects, gathering issue resolution requirements, and confirming readiness for release.
- Partner with technology teams on integration points, data dependencies, security considerations, platform constraints, and production support needs.
- · Keep current with Appian capabilities, including Appian AI, Case Management Studio, RPA, data fabric, reporting, and platform governance, and recommend opportunities to apply new capabilities responsibly.
- Champion Appian best practices around governance, reusability, modular design, versioning, packaging, maintainability, and controlled delivery in a regulated environment.
- Participate in agile ceremonies, including daily standups, planning sessions, backlog refinement, demos, and retrospectives.
- Build and maintain Appian reports and dashboards to track workflow performance, user activity, operational quality, and business metrics; partner with senior stakeholders to define meaningful KPIs.
- Understand and adhere to the Company’s risk and regulatory standards, policies and controls in accordance with the Company’s Risk Appetite. Identify risk-related issues needing escalation to management.
- Promote an environment that supports belonging and reflects the M&T Bank brand.
- Maintain M&T internal control standards, including timely implementation of internal and external audit points together with any issues raised by external regulators as applicable.
- Complete other related duties as assigned.
Education and Experience Required:
- Bachelor’s degree and a minimum of 10 years’ business, analytical, technical, digital product, transformation, or product ownership experience, or in lieu of a degree, a combined minimum of 14 years’ higher education and/or relevant work experience, including a minimum of 10 years’ business, analytical, technical, digital product, transformation, or product ownership experience.
- Hands-on experience with Appian, including experience building, configuring, testing, or supporting workflows, forms, interfaces, records, process models, reports, dashboards, or related Appian objects.
- Experience in financial services and/or fintech, including exposure to regulated business processes, operational risk, client service, banking, wealth management, trust services, payments, capital markets, lending, compliance, or similar domains.
- Experience operating as a product owner, product analyst, business analyst, transformation lead, or workflow designer in an agile or iterative delivery environment.
- Experience writing detailed, actionable user stories, acceptance criteria, specifications, process flows, business rules, UI concepts, testing scenarios, or release documentation.
- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, including the ability to structure ambiguous problems, assess operational impacts, analyze data or process evidence, and recommend practical solutions.
- Exposure to QA, UAT, regression testing, defect triage, test case development, production validation, or other solution quality practices.
- Working knowledge of AI-assisted tools or agentic AI concepts and the ability to use AI responsibly to improve analysis, documentation, testing, prototyping, or workflow delivery.
- Ability to bridge business and technical teams, translating needs into executable solutions and explaining technical constraints, risks, dependencies, and tradeoffs to stakeholders.
- Strong verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to facilitate working sessions, present recommendations, document decisions, and drive alignment across teams.
- Ability to manage competing priorities, work independently, and deliver in a fast-paced, regulated transformation environment.
Education and Experience Preferred:
- Appian Level 1 or higher certification, or equivalent hands-on experience with Appian Designer.
- Familiarity with SAIL expressions for configuring dynamic forms, validations, conditional logic, and reusable interface patterns.
- Understanding of Appian object reusability, versioning, packaging, release management, performance considerations, and platform governance best practices.
- Experience with Appian AI, Case Management Studio, Appian RPA, data fabric, connected systems, integrations, or document management workflows.
- Experience using agentic AI or AI-assisted development tools such as Claude Code, Codex, Open Claw, Hermes, or similar tools to support product analysis, prototyping, testing, documentation, or automation.
- Experience with low-code or no-code workflow platforms beyond Appian, such as Power Platform, ServiceNow, Salesforce, Pega, Airtable, Retool, Mendix, or similar tools.
- Corporate Trust, securities servicing, bond administration, transfer agent, paying agent, or financial operations domain experience is preferred.
- Strong understanding of business process mapping, process engineering, service design, user journey design, and operational improvement methods.
- Experience developing, managing, or launching digital capabilities in financial services, fintech, trust services, institutional services, compliance, legal operations, or document-intensive environments.
- Experience working in partnership with user experience, design, data, architecture, cybersecurity, risk, legal, compliance, or operations teams.
- Knowledge of Agile, Lean, design thinking, systems thinking, and continuous improvement principles and practices.