Associate Product Manager - Financial Management in East Lansing, Michigan at BS&A Software

BS&A Software

Hybrid — Bath, MI Headquarters | Full Time | Early Career | Up to 20% Travel

About the Role

This role is designed to grow. You'll start with the tactical heartbeat of the Financial Management product

line — backlog ownership, sprint execution, customer issue triage, and release communication — and ramp

into full product lifecycle ownership, including partnering on product strategy and roadmap direction. You'll

work in close partnership with product leadership as a genuine collaborator rather than a task-taker, with a

clear development path toward Product Manager.

Our product development process incorporates AI tools throughout the SDLC, from accelerating

requirements, design, and specification drafting through to documentation, data analysis, and reporting. We

expect this role to be an eager, curious participant in that workflow.

What You'll Do

Customer Discovery and Market Insight

• Talk directly to municipal finance staff — customer calls, user group sessions, site visits, sales demos,

and beta programs — to understand how the work actually gets done and how we can help

• Use product analytics (Pendo) to understand adoption, friction, and where capability is going unused

• Track the competitive and market landscape — what other ERP vendors are shipping, and where the

expectations of municipal finance teams are moving

• Synthesize signal from support tickets, sales conversations, and customer feedback into clear,

evidence-backed problem statements and solutions

Backlog and Sprint Execution

• Own and groom the Financial Management backlog — refine incoming requests, break work into

deliverable increments, and keep priority unambiguous

• Write user stories, acceptance criteria, and functional specifications that engineering can build from

without guesswork

• Partner with engineering and QA through sprint planning, refinement, review, and retrospective; keep

the team unblocked and answer scope questions in-sprint

• Track sprint health — scope changes, mid-sprint additions, and carryover — and surface the trade-offs

behind them

Customer Issue Triage

• Serve as first-pass triage for customer-reported issues and defects: reproduce, assess accounting and

operational impact, and set priority

• Partner with Support, Customer Success, and Implementation on escalations, workarounds, and

customer commitments

• Monitor backlog health and turnaround trends, and identify recurring patterns that point to deeper

product problems worth solving properly

Internal Stakeholder Engagement

• Build durable working relationships across Support, Sales, Implementation, and Customer Success to

understand their needs, friction points, and what they're hearing from customers

• Align stakeholders on priorities — explain what's in flight, what changed, and the reasoning behind

trade-offs, and carry their input back into prioritization decisions

• Represent internal stakeholder needs in backlog and roadmap discussions, weighing them against

customer demand and engineering capacity

• Supply product context for release communication, marketing newsletters, and training material so

customer-facing teams can speak accurately about what shipped and why it matters

Growth into Full Product Lifecycle Ownership

• Partner on Financial Management product strategy and roadmap, taking ownership of an expanding

share over time

• Build the business case for product investments, including market sizing, competitive context, and

expected customer outcomes

• Represent Financial Management in cross-product and platform initiatives such as integrations and

reporting

• Develop into a recognized internal authority on the Financial Management product line and the municipal

finance domain

What You'll Need

• 1–3 years of experience in product management or a closely adjacent product role such as business

analyst or product owner

• A working foundation in accounting — general ledger, chart of accounts, accounts payable and

receivable, budgeting, and year-end close — gained through formal education in accounting/finance or

hands-on experience in a municipal finance office; governmental or fund accounting exposure is a plus

• Direct experience engaging with customers, prospects, and internal stakeholders, with a track record of

building and maintaining relationships

• Strong written and verbal communication skills and real organizational discipline — you translate

between accounting language, technical detail, and plain English depending on who's in the room, and

keep several workstreams moving without dropping threads

• Collaborative by nature — you build relationships easily and work well across Engineering, Support,

Sales, Implementation, and directly with customers

• Comfort learning and working within an AI-assisted development workflow, using AI tools to accelerate

requirements writing, specification drafting, documentation, and analysis

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience

Nice to Have

• Experience with local government software, ERP systems, or accounting software in a product,

implementation, or support capacity

• A degree in accounting or finance

• Experience in an Agile or Scrum environment, including hands-on work in Jira

• Exposure to B2B SaaS products, particularly in government, municipal, or enterprise markets

• Familiarity with product analytics tools such as Pendo

• Experience using AI tools for brainstorming, design, or producing written deliverables like

documentation, requirements, or process artifacts