Platform Product Lead

About ApprovalMax

ApprovalMax provides end-to-end accounts payable automation for businesses using cloud accounting systems such as Xero and QuickBooks Online. We have 20,000+ businesses worldwide across 70+ countries, and strong product-market fit built over 8+ years. Our customers, accountants, bookkeepers, and finance teams are risk-averse, non-technical users who rely on us to control how money leaves their business.

Each product team owns a different part of the ApprovalMax experience. The Platform team owns the parts every customer relies on, whatever task they're doing: how they move around the product across web and mobilAbout ApprovalMaxe, how they search for approvals and documents, how they review the audit trail, and how they manage their account and access.

Why This Role Exists

Today this area is a mix: some improvements are live, others are held up behind foundational work, and AI-powered search is in beta. You will own prioritising this and driving it forward as the owner of a set of high-impact, product-wide capabilities.

AI is central to this remit. Search is a foundational block toward a much wider vision: natural-language interaction with monitoring Money Out. We expect genuine AI literacy helping form the strategy as much as executing it, and making product calls before every answer is settled.

Role Purpose

You own how the ApprovalMax platform works as a whole product for the customer across web, mobile, the Public API, and the moments in between. Customers expect to move from laptop to phone and back without friction, and increasingly other systems and AI agents will reach ApprovalMax programmatically too. Making all of that seamless is central to this role.

The Head of Product Experience sets the experience and design strategy; you turn it into a shipped product and own the platform and product decisions that make it work across every channel. You also have a real voice in the platform's architecture, understanding where it is today, where it should go, and representing the product view in those decisions.

This is a hands-on, senior IC role. You set the roadmap, run discovery, write Feature Cards (our one-page product specs: problem, proposed solution, success measures), and turn that roadmap into a shipped, adopted product, working through the TPL and partnering with other teams, using data to decide and prove impact.

Key Responsibilities:

Own the multi-surface customer experience: web, mobile, and API

• Own how the product works across web and mobile and the transitions between them, so it feels like one product wherever the customer is. Turn the Head of Product Experience's strategy and research into shipped navigation and journey improvements.

• Own the Public API and MCP connectivity, live today, with MCP in beta, as the channel through which external tools and AI agents reach ApprovalMax. Turning this into an adopted, expanding ecosystem (positioning, developer enablement, usage).

Own audit, reports, and search: standard and AI-powered

• Own search across the whole product, including AI-powered search, as a first-class capability acting as product and go-to-market partner to the AI Engineering team, taking it from beta to a confident release.

• Own how customers find bills, POs, and documents; run reports across them; and follow the time-stamped audit trail of decisions across every document type and accounting system. This record is core to what customers trust us for.

• Bring a strong, hands-on point of view on how LLM- and agent-powered features should behave for a risk-averse finance user where they add value, and how we earn trust through evaluation, accuracy, and transparency.

Own the account and identity experience

• Solve 2FA reset in an industrial, self-service way, moving it off manual, ticket-by-ticket support.

• Own account-owner and admin controls including how much flexibility to give the account owner (e.g. changing the account's setup email, currently fixed) working with Architecture and Security on safeguards for these security-sensitive decisions.

Prioritise the roadmap and shape the architecture

• Own priorities across this product-wide area, driving live work forward and unblocking held-up work. This is not a feature factory, you choose the needle-moving work customers genuinely want, not the next item on a list.

• Have a voice in the platform's architecture: understand where it is today and help decide where it goes.

Discovery, measurement, and adoption

• Use Amplitude and customer evidence to choose the right work, frame initiatives as testable hypotheses, and own adoption after launch. Good platform metrics are currently largely missing.

• Use AI tooling hands-on in your own discovery, prototyping, analysis, and bring that fluency into how the team works.

Must-Have's

• Senior B2B SaaS product management, operating independently and owning outcomes, not ‘contributing to’ them.

• A track record owning product-wide capabilities used across a whole product (e.g. search, navigation, account/identity, reports) rather than a single feature.

• Demonstrable platform ownership, architecture-level decisions (APIs, shared capabilities, the layer other products build on), not just the workflows above it. Fluent in technical and architecture trade-offs.

• Experience across web and mobile, with real understanding of how customers move between devices mid-task.

• Shipped AI/LLM-powered product as the product partner to an engineering or ML team, owning product and go-to-market, not the models. Understands what today's LLMs and agentic systems can and can't do, and the trade-offs that follow (accuracy, latency, cost, evaluation, trust).

• Hands-on AI literacy and high tolerance for ambiguity, energised, not blocked, by a still-forming AI strategy; able to turn it into shipped, adopted product.

• Strong systems thinking and the credibility to have a voice in architecture conversations, getting things built through teams you don't manage.

• Deep data fluency (Amplitude or equivalent), able to define metrics where none exist and using data to decide.

• Comfortable owning security-sensitive account and identity decisions (2FA, account-takeover risk) in partnership with Architecture and Security.

Nice to Have:

• Fintech, accounting, payments, or another domain where correctness, permissions, and auditability matter.

• Public API or developer-platform experience, driving adoption of an API or integration ecosystem (MCP or agent-to-agent connectivity a strong plus).

• Distributed-team experience, our R&D is largely in Eastern Europe; cultural awareness and timezone overlap matter.

• You don't need to code but comfort reading technical designs and working closely with engineers is expected.

• You don't need prior Xero or QuickBooks Online experience but you'll need to learn the ecosystem fast.

This Role Is Not For You If:

• You need a team of your own to run, this role owns product-wide capabilities built through teams you don't manage.

• You want a single feature area with your own visible surface, this role ties the whole product together.

• You want to own the AI models themselves, that sits with central AI Engineering; you own the product and go-to-market.

• You need a fully settled organisation and mature infrastructure before you can do your best work.

• You want the AI strategy handed to you fully formed, ours is still taking shape, and you'll help write it.

What we offer:

• Salary of £90,000 - £100,000, dependent on experience/location

• Health & Wellbeing Benefit Stipend

• Home Office Setup - one off £500 reimbursement, post probation

• 26 days of paid time off

• 1 additional day off for your birthday

• Service-years recognition financial reward

• Regular performance-based compensation reviews

• Growing international business with 10,000+ subscribers