Job description
At OakNorth, we’re on a mission to empower the UK’s most ambitious businesses. Since 2015, we’ve lent over $18 billion across the UK and US, helped create more than 58,000 new homes and 36,000 new jobs, and supported hundreds of thousands of personal savers — all while fuelling the UK economy.
The Role 👋
OakNorth is looking for a Senior Product Manager to lead the re-imagining and digitisation of in-life loan monitoring as part of the Digital Lending programme within the Lending business unit.
This is a senior, hands-on product leadership position, accountable for transforming how monitoring is performed across the lifecycle of a loan. You will own the product strategy, roadmap, and outcomes for digitising risk-based monitoring processes, replacing existing ways of working with scalable, technology-enabled approaches.
Monitoring is a deeply embedded, expert-led function with strong existing practices and high regulatory sensitivity. This role exists to challenge and change those practices—thoughtfully, credibly, and decisively. Success will depend on your conviction, experience, and ability to demonstrate that better ways of working are both possible and safe.
This is not a “step-up” role. OakNorth is explicitly looking for a seasoned Senior Product Manager who has already led monitoring or similar process-heavy transformations and can operate with confidence and authority from day one.
What we’re looking for 👀
- Product strategy for in-life monitoring
- Own the end-to-end product strategy for digitising in-life monitoring across the loan portfolio.
- Define how risk-based monitoring should operate in a modern lending organisation—balancing automation, human judgement, proportionality, and regulatory expectations.
- Move monitoring toward digitised data-driven approaches aligned to risk, exposure, and behaviour.
- Ensure the strategy is grounded in delivery reality and proven practice, not theoretical models.
- Re-imagining and digitising monitoring processes
- Lead the fundamental re-design of existing monitoring processes, not just their digitisation.
- Identify where current ways of working add genuine value—and where there is scope for change.
- Translate re-imagined processes into clear product requirements, workflows, and decision support.
- Take accountability for simplifying, standardising, and automating where appropriate—while protecting critical risk controls.
- Delivery, adoption, and embedded change
- Lead delivery of monitoring capabilities that are actively adopted and trusted by Monitoring, Credit, and Risk teams.
- Ensure change is embedded in day-to-day operations, not left as optional tooling or parallel processes.
- Balance pace with confidence—knowing when to push through resistance and when to slow down to bring stakeholders with you.
- Own outcomes such as efficiency, consistency, auditability, and user confidence—not just feature delivery.
- Stakeholder leadership in a high-resistance environment
- Act as the senior product partner to the Monitoring function.
- Navigate significant challenge and pushback from experienced practitioners with strong views on how monitoring “should” be done.
- Use evidence, experience, and clarity to build credibility and influence decision-making.
- Partner closely with Risk, Credit, Compliance, and Legal to ensure changes are robust, defensible, and well-understood.
- Build, buy, and orchestrate
- Take a pragmatic, value-led approach to technology decisions, with a strong bias toward buying and orchestrating best-in-class solutions where appropriate.
- Maintain a strong understanding of the external vendor landscape for monitoring, covenant tracking, financial spreading, early warning indicators, and portfolio analytics.
- Work with Engineering to integrate third-party solutions into OakNorth’s broader lending platform.
- Ensure build vs buy decisions are justified by speed, flexibility, total cost, and long-term maintainability.
- Discovery, prioritisation, and decision-making
- Run focused, high-quality discovery to understand pain points, risk drivers, and operational constraints.
- Make clear prioritisation decisions in a crowded and opinionated space.
- Be comfortable saying no—or materially changing scope—when work does not support the intended outcomes.
- Maintain a clear line of sight between monitoring objectives, regulatory expectations, and product delivery.
What success looks like 🏆
- Monitoring processes are materially more risk-based, proportionate, and consistent.
- Manual effort is reduced without loss of control, judgement, or confidence.
- Monitoring teams actively use and trust digital tools as part of their core workflow.
- Stakeholders acknowledge that monitoring is clearer, more defensible, and easier to operate.
- Product delivery is aligned, credible, and visibly improving monitoring outcomes.
- Internal user sentiment is “we wouldn’t go back”.
About you 🫵
- Have explicit, hands-on experience digitising in-life monitoring or equivalent post-origination risk processes in lending.
- Have re-designed and embedded risk-based processes before—and understand why they succeed or fail in practice.
- Bring strong conviction, resilience, and credibility when challenging entrenched ways of working.
- Are comfortable operating in environments with high regulatory scrutiny and strong expert opinion.
- Have a proven track record of delivering adopted change, not just launching tools.
- Understand the monitoring technology ecosystem and can confidently evaluate build vs buy options.
- Are decisive, outcome-focused, and willing to stand behind difficult product decisions.
What makes working here better 😍
- This is a truly hybrid role, offering engineers and Product the flexibility to work from home while also providing opportunities to collaborate in person with the team when it adds value. There’s no fixed requirement for days in the office, instead, we focus on creating space for engineers & Product to engage meaningfully, whether that’s in-person for whiteboarding sessions or remote for deep focus work.
- Work-life balance 🌴 - 25 days holiday (plus bank holidays) each year, and enhanced family leave allowances.
- Competitive salary & equity 🏦 - We want people to have a serious stake in the business.
- Good kit 💻 - Your choice of the best laptop, running macOS or Ubuntu.
- Team socials 🎉 - The opportunity to get to know each other outside of work.
- Company socials 🥡 - A chance to catch up and meet new colleagues weekly over informal office breakfasts and dinners on OakNorth - or at our free barista bar every day.
- Commuter support 🚲 - We offer the cycle to work & EV scheme.
We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.
