Director, Product Management - Auto Finance & Risk Intelligence
Hearst · Lawrenceville
About the Role:
Automotive lenders, captive finance companies, securitization issuers, and investors need a timely, explainable view of how vehicle values are changing across vehicle loan and lease portfolios and the securities backed by that collateral. Black Book already has a strong, differentiated position in automotive valuation and residual intelligence. It observes wholesale outcomes every day and combines that independent market view with proprietary vehicle valuation, predictive analytics, and deep automotive knowledge. This role will turn that advantage into products that help customers identify risk and make better financial decisions.
Black Book is looking for a hands-on, AI-first product leader to grow our Auto Finance & Risk Intelligence product portfolio. This person will use AI throughout the product lifecycle, not only to accelerate research and documentation, but to turn customer conversations into working prototypes, test and refine them with customers, and translate validated learning into clear product direction for Engineering to build into enterprise-ready products that customers understand, adopt, and pay for.
You will own product strategy for Auto Finance & Risk Intelligence, serving lenders and captive finance companies, securitization issuers, institutional investors, and banks, while working closely with Data Science, Residuals, Automotive Valuations, Data Operations, Product Engineering, Sales, and other Black Book teams. Your priority will be building and validating a net-new product for automotive finance risk and valuation workflows, from customer discovery through a sellable product, while managing the existing Auto Finance portfolio.
This is an AI-first product-building role, not a backlog-administration role. We are looking for a product leader who can move from a live customer conversation to an AI-built prototype quickly, use that prototype to learn and validate, and then hand product direction to Engineering for enterprise implementation. You will also make hard prioritization decisions, including what not to build, and take ownership from opportunity through launch and measurable performance.
Responsibilities:
What You'll Do
- Own the Auto Finance & Risk Intelligence product strategy, roadmap, and portfolio prioritization across net-new opportunities and the broader product portfolio.
- Lead customer and market discovery with lenders, captive finance companies, securitization issuers, institutional investors, banks, and other automotive finance participants.
- Identify and validate high-value opportunities across automotive finance risk, portfolio analytics, collateral intelligence, valuation decision support, and scenario analysis.
- Build product theses and business cases that connect customer value, data feasibility, commercial potential, competitive differentiation, and delivery investment.
- Translate customer needs and Jobs to Be Done into clear product outcomes, workflows, prototypes, and requirements.
- Lead an AI-first discovery loop that moves from customer conversations to working prototypes, puts those prototypes in front of customers, and uses what you learn to iterate toward validated product requirements.
- Partner with Product Engineering, Data Science, Residuals, Automotive Valuations, and Data Operations to validate feasibility, align on requirements, and keep delivery connected to the customer problem.
- Secure early customer validation, including anchor customers willing to pay, before significant product investment is committed.
- Own launch decisions, launch readiness, sales enablement, and the feedback loop from early adoption into the roadmap.
- Partner with the SVP Product & Technology on packaging and pricing and take increasing ownership as the product and commercial model mature.
- Define and monitor product performance, including customer adoption, usage, retention, expansion, revenue contribution, and evidence of customer value.
- Coach and develop one Product Owner while establishing clear product practices across the Auto Finance & Risk Intelligence portfolio.
What Success Looks Like
- A clear Auto Finance & Risk Intelligence product strategy, portfolio roadmap, and criteria for what gets built next that teams can execute against.
- Anchor customers validated and the first contract signed at or above target pricing.
- A validated net-new product brought to market, supported by clear positioning, packaging, pricing, and launch readiness.
- Strong alignment between customer needs, Black Book's proprietary data and analytics capabilities, and Product Engineering delivery.
- Products that demonstrate measurable customer value and improve Black Book's position in automotive finance and risk intelligence.
Qualifications:
What We're Looking For
- 8+ years of product management experience, including 3+ years owning a product portfolio or leading cross-functional product initiatives, across product strategy, customer discovery, requirements, delivery, launch, and post-launch product performance for complex data, analytics, SaaS, or workflow products.
- Deep experience in automotive finance, with a strong understanding of the decisions and workflows of lenders, captives, servicers, issuers, or investors, including how recovery, loss severity, and residual values drive credit loss and lease economics.
- Working fluency in asset-backed lending, structured finance, or securitization, with an understanding of collateral performance, risk monitoring, and the information needs of lenders, issuers, servicers, and investors.
- A track record of taking data, analytics, or complex domain expertise and turning it into products customers will buy and use.
- Experience leading 0-to-1 product discovery and validation, including customer interviews, prototypes, business cases, willingness-to-pay conversations, and design-partner development.
- Strong ability to work hands-on while influencing Data Science, Engineering, Operations, Sales, and executive stakeholders.
- Experience using customer feedback, product usage, and commercial results to make product decisions.
- Ability to partner effectively with Data Science and Product Engineering, with an understanding of predictive models, APIs, analytics workflows, data quality, and product instrumentation.
- Excellent written and verbal communication, with the ability to make complex automotive and financial concepts clear to both technical and commercial audiences.
- Demonstrated hands-on experience using AI tools such as Claude Code, Lovable or comparable tools to rapidly prototype product workflows, learn from customer feedback, and iterate toward validated product requirements.
- Willingness and ability to travel, including occasional travel to Canada.
Nice to Have
- Direct experience applying or commercializing vehicle residual values, automotive valuation, lease or loan portfolio analytics, collateral surveillance, or remarketing intelligence.
- Experience commercializing API, SaaS, data, or analytics products for enterprise customers.
- Experience with pricing and packaging for data or workflow products.
- Existing relationships with automotive lenders, captives, servicers, ABS issuers, investors, or related industry participants.
How We Work
- We start with the customer problem and stay close to the customer through launch.
- We treat AI prototypes as a first-class product discovery artifact: build quickly, put them in front of customers, learn what works, and iterate before asking Engineering to build enterprise-ready software.
- AI is part of the product development workflow, not a separate experiment. We use it to explore, build, test, and communicate while maintaining human judgment, data governance, and commercial accountability.
- We value clear decisions, practical collaboration, and ownership of outcomes.
- We expect product leaders to work across functions and to make complex work easier for the teams delivering it.
Why Black Book?
Black Book combines deep automotive expertise with data science, predictive analytics, valuation intelligence, APIs, and modern technology. As part of the Hearst Transportation group, we have the scale and stability of a larger organization while giving product leaders the opportunity to shape important products, work directly with customers, and build new capabilities in a market where better data can improve financial decisions.
If you are energized by automotive finance, complex data, customer discovery, and building products from 0-to-1, we'd like to talk.
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