Lead Product Manager | Bankrate

Role Overview

As a Lead Product Manager at Bankrate, you will own product strategy, roadmap, and outcomes for a cross-functional squad focused on transforming Bankrate’s mortgage marketplace into a centralized hub for the full home financing journey. The goal is to deepen the user value proposition and scale lender partnerships by delivering higher-qualified, deeply validated leads.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the Centralized Platform: Define a 12–24 month product vision for an end-to-end digital mortgage experience (affordability → pre-approval → application submission → real loan estimate comparison).
• Build Advanced Consumer Financing Tools: Lead delivery of native capabilities for:
  • accurate home affordability analysis
  • streamlined pre-approval workflows
  • side-by-side comparisons of real loan estimates
• Partner with Third-Party Vendors: Lead vendor partnerships to build high-fidelity data capture and verification that converts marketplace inquiries into transaction-ready leads.
• Simplify the Application Lifecycle: Create secure, seamless pathways that help users submit mortgage applications directly to lenders, shifting from browsing to transacting.
• Strategic Tradeoffs: Balance needs of two key personas:
  • Consumers (transparency, speed, real loan options)
  • Lenders (verified, high-intent, compliant borrower data)
• Squad Leadership: Partner with Engineering and Design to ensure strong execution health, technical quality, and proper sequencing between foundational data infrastructure and consumer-facing features.
• Operational Excellence: Set operating rhythms, decision frameworks, and success metrics to support consistent delivery and learning.
• Data-Driven Iteration: Use quantitative and qualitative insights to validate strategy and iterate across both:
  • B2C (affordability + application flows)
  • B2B (lender integration + data delivery)

Requirements

• Proven experience building engaging consumer experiences, ideally with complex flows, financial tooling, or end-to-end application funnels.
• Experience evolving a marketplace from lead generation into a more data-validated transactional platform.
• Ability to manage multiple parallel workstreams and influence cross-functionally while maintaining strategic clarity and execution discipline.
• Experience working with APIs and/or underwriting engines.

Nice-to-Haves

• Readiness or prior experience mentoring and/or transitioning into people management as the team/product expands.