Kelly Barbeau

Resume

Kelly Barbeau

Director of Product · Charlotte, NC

Experience

Kiavi Feb 2025 – Present

Director of Product Management

  • Leading and mentoring a team of PMs, driving strategic vision and cross-functional collaboration across engineering, risk, sales, and underwriting.
  • Own product strategy and roadmap for underwriting and risk automation — recent deliveries include automated KYC via Plaid, an instant ARV estimator, and GenAI scope-of-work document extraction.
  • Driving AI-powered underwriting automation that has reduced manual review time by 20% and accelerated loan approvals.
Kiavi Jun 2022 – Feb 2025

Principal Product Manager

  • Led product initiatives integrating ML models and external data to deliver instant loan decisioning.
  • Aligned product roadmap with company OKRs using data-driven insights to improve lending speed and risk assessment accuracy.
Accion Opportunity Fund Jan 2021 – Jun 2022

Director of Product Management

  • Directed a complete technical rewrite of the loan origination system, transitioning from legacy infrastructure to a modern React.js and AWS Lambda stack.
  • Designed and shipped a risk scorecard API enabling cash-flow-based borrower assessments, replacing traditional credit score models.
  • Led a cross-functional team to deliver a 20% improvement in loan origination time.
Praxent Jun 2017 – Dec 2020

Client Partner / Senior PM / Product Manager

  • Led cross-functional teams delivering fintech solutions across lending, insurance, and real estate; managed $3M+ in client portfolios at 65% gross margin.
  • Delivered 92% of projects on time and under budget overseeing a $250K+ monthly budget.
  • Key projects: Bungalo (PropTech MVP in <8 months), Austin Capital Bank (tech audit), compliance-driven insurance benefits platform.
Nuance Communications Jan 2016 – Apr 2017

Technical Consultant / Software Engineer

  • Promoted within 9 months from Software Engineer to Technical Consultant; led 6 enterprise implementations of FreeSpeech, used by 25,000+ call center agents globally.
  • Developed backend features (Java, Angular 2) for a web application used by 14 of the top 15 U.S. banks.

Education

Wake Forest University 2024 – 2026

MBA, School of Business

McGill University 2011 – 2015

Bachelor of Software Engineering

Skills

AI & ML in Lending Product Strategy Fintech & Underwriting Data-Driven Development Cross-Functional Leadership Risk Modeling Agile / Scrum React.js AWS Java