Product Manager, Network Rules & Governance

Context 

Altic is the rules-based operational network that enables private markets to operate within managed accounts at scale. It is the infrastructure layer that did not exist before. Not a platform, not a portal, not a workflow tool. The right historical reference is not the alternatives access platforms of the last decade, it is what NSCC and Omgeo did for equities: common standards, rules and infrastructure that allowed an entire asset class to operate at volume. 

The network is built in a sequence, and the sequence is not arbitrary. Rules, then digitisation, then intelligence, then scale. You cannot digitise without rules. You cannot get to intelligence without digitisation. This is why Altic starts with the rulebook. 

What follows from that is the part people miss. The rulebook, the technical specification and the participant agreement are not paperwork sitting alongside the technology. They are what the technology gets built on. A legal framework agreed once across every participant is what makes a common technical standard possible, and that standard is what turns a set of bilateral relationships into market infrastructure. The rules work is the foundation of the network build, not a condition of being allowed to start it. 

Every large network has a function that owns its rules. Payments has Visa Rules Management and a Rules Committee. ACH has Nacha's operating rules. Securities settlement has the DTCC and SWIFT standards bodies. Private markets has never had one. This role is the first of its kind for the asset class. 

Purpose of the Role 

You will own the Altic rulebook, the technical specification and the network's participant agreement as products, not as documents. That means being accountable for what they say, how they change, who agrees to them, and how quickly the network can absorb a change once it is agreed. It also means being the face of them. Externally, you are the rulebook. 

The immediate job is twofold. Give the network a genuine product owner of its rules, and formalise the governance framework that decides how those rules change, including standing up the committee structure that does not exist yet. Where it goes after that is harder to predict, but as the scope of the network grows the manual version of this job stops scaling. Part of the role is building towards the capability that replaces it: a change-management capability that captures participant feedback, assesses impact across the network, and shortens the cycle from a raised issue to a published rule. 

You define the rules and the requirements the network is built against, working closely with technical product management and engineering as the build takes shape. The test of your work is not whether the documents are well drafted. It is whether the rules are agreed, adopted, and clear enough to build against. 

Key Stakeholders 

• Legal and governance, internal and outside counsel 
• GPs and asset managers participating in the network 
• Wealth managers and platform participants 
• Service providers including transfer agents, fund administrators and custodians 
• Business Development, Partnerships and Strategy 
• PMN Technical Product Management and Engineering 
• PMN Product and Operations 

Why This Role Is Different 

This role offers: 

• A first of its kind mandate. Nobody has built a rules function for private markets. There is no incumbent playbook to inherit and no template to fill in.
• The governance framework does not exist yet. You will formalise it and stand up the committee structure, rather than inherit someone else's process and administer it. 
• The rules are the foundation of the build. What gets agreed in the rulebook is what the technical network is designed against, so this is not documentation that sits to one side. 
• Ownership of the artefacts the entire network depends on, rather than a slice of a roadmap someone else set. 
• A genuinely external role. You will present the rulebook, teach it, and run the forums and events where the network argues it out, in person and virtually. 

The rulebook is not a document you maintain. It is the product the network runs on, and you are the person who stands behind it. 

How you will provide meaningful contributions: 

What You'll Actually Be Doing 

This role sits between legal, engineering and the participants themselves, and a lot of it happens in front of people. On any given week, you might be: 

• Walking a GP's counsel through a rule they have taken issue with, and coming back with a change the rest of the network can actually absorb.
• Presenting the rulebook to a wealth platform's operations leadership, then staying in the room for the two hours of questions that follow.
• Turning a legal position agreed with outside counsel into a clear requirement the technical product and engineering teams can specify against without guessing.
• Working out whether the exception a participant is asking for is a waiver, a rule change, or a signal that the rule itself is wrong.
• Preparing the papers for a rules committee, chasing the decision, then publishing the version and making sure every participant knows what changed and by when.
• Prototyping the tooling that will eventually run rule change and feedback, rather than waiting for a roadmap slot to do it properly. 

Key Responsibilities 

Owning the Rulebook, Technical Specification and Participant Agreement 

• Own the Altic rulebook end to end, including its structure, its content, its versioning and the standard by which it is written.
• Own the technical specification as the expression of the rules the network is built against, and keep it and the rulebook in lockstep as both evolve. 
• Own the network's participant agreement alongside legal, so that what a participant signs and what the network enforces are the same thing. 
• Maintain the mapping between a legal obligation, the rule that carries it and the system behaviour that is expected to enforce it. 
• Hold the line on consistency, so a rule agreed once holds for every participant rather than being renegotiated bilaterally. 

Governance, Committees and Rule Change 

• Formalise the network's governance framework, including how a rule is proposed, assessed, agreed and published, who decides, and on what evidence. 
• Stand up and then run the committee structure that governs the rulebook, including membership, cadence, papers and the decision record. 
• Assess the downstream impact of a proposed change across participants, systems and existing agreements before it is committed. 
• Handle waivers and exceptions deliberately, tracking where the same waiver keeps recurring, because that is usually a rule waiting to be rewritten. 
• Keep a defensible record of why every rule says what it says, so the network can answer that question years later. 

Advocacy, Education and Adoption 

• Be the public face of the rulebook. Present it, defend it and explain it to GPs, wealth managers, service providers and their counsel. 
• Run rule review with participants directly and get to agreement rather than to a logged objection. 
• Design and host the forums that keep the dialogue going, including working groups, virtual sessions and onsite events. 
• Build the reference material, briefings and Q&A that let a participant onboard to the rules without a bespoke explanation each time. 
• Work with Business Development and Partnerships so rule conversations move commercial conversations forward rather than stalling them. 

Productising the Rules 

• Treat the rulebook as a product with users, a release cycle and a feedback loop, not as documentation that gets updated when someone remembers. 
• Prototype and build the change-management capability that captures participant feedback, surfaces impact and shortens the cycle from issue to published rule. 
• Use AI to automate the repetitive parts of the job, including impact analysis, drafting, consistency checking and synthesis of participant feedback. 
• Work with technical product management and engineering so that agreed rules become enforceable system behaviour, holding before an order is placed, which is what in-good-order by design actually requires. 

Basic Qualifications for Consideration: 

Skills & Experience 

Ownership of rules or standards: you have owned a rulebook, scheme rules, market practice guidance, a technical standard or equivalent, and you have taken it through a change cycle with external parties. Experience of the governance around it, including committees, papers and decision records, is directly relevant, as is a background in a payments, clearing, settlement or messaging network. 

Legal fluency without being the lawyer: you can read a fund document, a participant agreement or a piece of counsel's advice and work out what it obliges the network to do. Comfortable holding your own with internal and outside counsel, and clear about where your judgement ends and theirs begins. 

Private markets lifecycle knowledge: you understand how an alternatives transaction actually moves, including subscriptions, redemptions, capital calls, distributions and post-trade servicing, and how transfer agents, fund administrators, custodians and investor relations teams fit together. Evergreen, semi-liquid and interval structures matter most here. 

Translation between legal and technical: you can take an agreed legal position and turn it into a requirement a technical product manager or engineer can build against, and take a system constraint back to legal in terms they can act on. Enough technical understanding to know when a rule is unbuildable. 

Precision in writing: you write rules that mean one thing. You can tell the difference between ambiguity that needs resolving and ambiguity that is doing deliberate work, and you notice when a change to one clause quietly breaks another. 

Credible in front of a room: you can present a rulebook to a participant's operating committee, teach it to people who have to live with it, and hold a two-way discussion rather than deliver a monologue. Comfortable running working groups and events, virtual and in person. 

Adoption over authorship: you have driven agreement between organisations with competing interests, where you had influence rather than authority. Getting a rule written is the easy part. Getting it agreed is the job. 

Hands-on with AI: actively excited about using the latest AI techniques to automate and prototype. Comfortable across AI, no-code and low-code tools, and inclined to build a working thing rather than write a requirements document about it. 

Domain experience (beneficial, not required): any of the following gives you a head start, and none of them on its own is the role: direct experience at a network participant or service provider, whether a transfer agent, fund administrator, custodian, GP or wealth platform; alternatives product or operations experience from a firm such as iCapital or CAIS; knowledge of the wealth management channel and of managed accounts, including model-driven and portfolio-driven trading; a legal background in financial markets, private markets or funds; or a legal-tech background. 

Personal Attributes 

• Comfortable being the first person to do something, with no incumbent process to inherit. 
• Patient with detail and impatient with drift. Rules reward both. 
• Shows rather than tells. Defaults to a working prototype over a slide deck. 
• Holds a position under pressure from a large counterparty, and changes it when the argument is genuinely better. 
• Treats a recurring exception as a design problem rather than an administrative one. 
• Happy to be the named owner of something the whole network can disagree with in public. 

About InvestCloud 

InvestCloud, a global leader in wealth technology, aspires to enable a smarter financial future. Driving the digital transformation of the wealth management industry, the company serves a broad array of clients globally, including Wealth and Asset Managers, Wirehouses, Banks, RIAs, and Insurers. In terms of scale, the company’s clients represent more than 40 percent of the $132 trillion of total assets globally. As a leader in delivering personalization and scale across advisory programs, including unified managed accounts (UMA) and separately managed accounts (SMA), the company is committed to the success of its clients. By equipping and enabling advisors and their clients with connected technology, enhanced intelligence, and inspired experiences, InvestCloud delivers leading digital wealth management and financial planning solutions, complemented by a dynamic data warehouse, which scale across the complete wealth continuum. In 2024, InvestCloud was named CNBC World’s Top Fintech Company, a proof point of the company’s commitment to innovation and client success. Headquartered in the United States, InvestCloud serves clients around the world. For more information, visit InvestCloud.com. 

Our Values 

Client Connected 

Human Centered 

Technology Forward 

Respect + Integrity 

Excellence 
 
 
The actual salary will vary based on applicant’s education, experience, skills, and abilities, as well as internal equity and alignment with market data.  The salary may also be adjusted based on the applicant’s geographic location. Salary range:  $165,000 - $195,000. Benefits include medical/Rx, dental, vision, disability, and life/AD&D insurance plans, Flexible Savings Account (FSA), Health Savings Account (HSA), Employee Assistance Plan (EAP), health advocacy, voluntary ancillary plans (accident, critical illness, hospital indemnity, legal, identity theft, auto/home, and pet insurance), 401(k) retirement savings plan with company match, and paid time off.  

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