Product Lead

About Finanshels Finanshels is a fast-growing fintech building the Financial Operating System (FinOS) for SMEs across the MENA region. We automate accounting and tax operations, deliver real-time financial health insights, and build systems which help finance teams scale efficiently. Our product operates across multiple UAE regulatory frameworks, and we build it with a small, high-ownership, AI-native team. THE OPPORTUNITY Our customers experience Finanshels through accounting, taxation, bookkeeping and more — and today that experience is fragmented, manual, and stitched across disconnected systems. Talented builders are shipping AI-powered solutions against individual pieces of it, at speed, but without a unifying product view of the journey those pieces belong to. This role exists to fix that. You will own the customer experience charter on FinOS: replacing a broken, manual journey with automated, productised, and unified experiences across every stage and every service line. Along the way, you will raise the product bar for how the whole team builds — defining the problem, the user, and the measure of success before engineering begins. This is a hands-on role in a startup. You will start as the sole product owner for this charter, reporting to the Head of Product, with scope to build and lead a product team as the function grows. What You'll Own ▸ The End-to-End Customer Journey. Map, diagnose, and rebuild the customer experience across service lines — from first touch through ongoing delivery — turning manual, fragmented steps into unified, productised flows on FinOS. ▸ Automation at the Core. Identify where human effort is absorbing what the product should do, and drive the automation that removes it — measured in customer effort reduced and operational hours freed. ▸ Consolidation onto One Platform. Bring capability scattered across legacy internal systems into a single coherent experience, so customers and the teams serving them work in one place, not many. ▸ Product Standards for AI-Native Building. Raise how the team builds. Bring rigour — clear problem definition, user clarity, success metrics, and evaluation — to AI features that today ship without it. ▸ Prioritisation and Sequencing. Decide what gets built and in what order. Protect the roadmap from work that does not move the metric, and retire builds that have stopped earning their place. ▸ Product Execution. Own roadmap and releases with Engineering, Delivery, Tax and CX. Set standards for accuracy, security, auditability and approvals. Prioritize by hours saved, reliability, customer impact and cost. ▸ Measurement. Define the metrics that describe a healthy customer journey, instrument them with our data and analytics team, and hold the roadmap accountable to them. OWNERSHIP AND AUTONOMY This role carries a clearly defined charter and the authority to run it. Within that charter you are expected to decide — on scope and sequencing, operating cadence and product rituals, user experience and workflow direction, what the team declines to build, and what gets retired. Tooling and vendor decisions sit with you within an agreed budget. Decisions that shift resources beyond your charter, affect pricing or revenue, or cannot be reversed are made jointly with the Head of Product. Everything else is yours. What We're Looking For ▸ Experience. 5+ years in product management, including a period as an early or founding product hire responsible for establishing the function. ▸ Building the Discipline. A demonstrable track record of moving a team from output to outcomes — introducing product practice where it did not previously exist, and making it stick. ▸ Commercial Judgment. You connect every product decision to a business result — revenue earned, cost removed, or time returned — and can defend the trade-off. ▸ Technical Credibility. Engineers regard you as a peer. You hold your own on architecture and data trade-offs and know when technical debt is the right call. ▸ Customer Obsession. You work close to real users — business owners, accountants, tax consultants — and can translate observed friction into shipped improvement. ▸ Journey and Service Design. Proven ability to diagnose experience failure across a complex, multi-stage, partly manual journey and redesign it as a product. ▸ AI Fluency in Practice. You have shipped AI-powered products to production and can speak credibly to evaluation, guardrails, and how you measured whether it worked. ▸ Communication. You write clearly enough that your strategy documents do not need rewriting, and you influence through evidence rather than authority. ▸ Domain (Preferred). Fintech, accounting, tax, or another regulated or professional-services environment. WHY FINANSHELS ▸ Genuine Ownership. Define the customer experience charter from the ground up. ▸ AI-First Mandate. Applied AI is not a side project — it is how we build. ▸ Lean Team, High Impact. Every person and every decision matters. ▸ Fintech at the Right Moment. Finanshels is at an inflection point, and this role will define how we scale. How To Apply Send your CV, along with anything that shows how you build — a strategy document, a before-and-after journey you rebuilt, or a product you are proud of — to [email protected] Show more Show less

Experience: 5+ years in product management, including a period as an early or founding product hire responsible for establishing the function. Building the Discipline: track record of moving a team from output to outcomes — introducing product practice where it did not previously exist, and making it stick. Commercial Judgment: connect every product decision to a business result — revenue earned, cost removed, or time returned. Technical Credibility: engineers regard you as a peer, able to discuss architecture and data trade-offs and know when technical debt is appropriate. Customer Obsession: work close to real users (business owners, accountants, tax consultants) and translate friction into shipped improvements. Journey and Service Design: diagnose and redesign complex, multi-stage, partly manual journeys as a product. AI Fluency in Practice: shipped AI-powered products to production with credible evaluation, guardrails, and measurement. Communication: clear strategy documents and evidence-based influence. Domain (Preferred): Fintech, accounting, tax, or other regulated/professional-services environment.

Own the End-to-End Customer Journey across service lines; map, diagnose, and rebuild the customer experience from first touch through ongoing delivery into unified, productised flows on FinOS. Drive Automation at the Core to reduce manual effort, measured by customer effort and hours freed. Consolidate capability onto One Platform, bringing legacy systems into a single experience. Establish Product Standards for AI-Native Building with rigorous problem definition, user clarity, success metrics, and evaluation for AI features. Prioritize and sequence work to maximize impact; protect the roadmap and retire non-performing builds. Own Product Execution: roadmap and releases with Engineering, Delivery, Tax, and CX; set standards for accuracy, security, auditability, and approvals. Define and instrument metrics describing a healthy customer journey and hold the roadmap accountable. Exercise Ownership and Autonomy within charter; make scope, sequencing, cadence, rituals, UX direction, and product retirements decisions; tooling and vendor choices within budget; major resource/pricing decisions with Head of Product.