Founding Product Manager (New York)

Founding Product Manager

Early-Stage Tech Startup | 0-to-1 Product Development | High-Impact Leadership

Location: New York, NY

Employment Type: Full-Time

Compensation: Competitive Base Salary + Meaningful Equity

About the Opportunity

We are partnering with an ambitious, early-stage technology startup looking for an exceptional Founding Product Manager to help build and scale its product from the ground up.

This is a rare opportunity to join a founding team and play a pivotal role in shaping the company's product vision, strategy, and execution.

We're looking for a highly entrepreneurial product leader who thrives in ambiguity, moves quickly, and gets excited about turning complex problems into intuitive, scalable solutions.

You'll work directly with the founders and engineering team, owning the product lifecycle from initial discovery through launch and iteration.

This isn't a role for someone who wants to inherit an established roadmap. We're looking for someone who wants to build the roadmap.

What You'll Do

• Own the Product Vision: Partner directly with the founders to define product strategy, priorities, and long-term direction.
• Build From Zero to One: Lead product development from ideation and customer discovery through MVP, launch, and continuous iteration.
• Drive Product Execution: Translate business objectives and user needs into actionable product requirements, roadmaps, and deliverables.
• Work Closely With Engineering: Collaborate with technical teams to make thoughtful tradeoffs, remove roadblocks, and ship high-quality products quickly.
• Develop Customer Insights: Conduct user interviews, analyze feedback, and identify opportunities to improve product-market fit.
• Leverage Data: Establish KPIs and use quantitative and qualitative insights to guide product decisions.
• Champion the User Experience: Partner with design and engineering to create intuitive, impactful customer experiences.
• Operate Like a Founder: Take ownership beyond traditional product management responsibilities and contribute wherever the business needs you most.
• Build for Scale: Help establish the product processes, tools, and frameworks needed to support company growth.

What We're Looking For

• 5+ years of product management experience, ideally within high-growth startups or technology companies.
• Demonstrated experience launching products from 0 to 1 , rather than solely optimizing existing products.
• Proven ability to work closely with founders, engineers, and designers in fast-moving environments.
• Strong technical fluency and the ability to communicate effectively with software engineering teams.
• Experience owning end-to-end product development, from discovery through delivery.
• Exceptional analytical thinking, prioritization, and problem-solving skills.
• A customer-obsessed mindset with experience translating user feedback into product improvements.
• Strong communication skills and the confidence to influence stakeholders at every level.
• Comfort operating with limited structure, evolving priorities, and significant autonomy.
• An execution-oriented mentality with a demonstrated ability to ship products.

What Will Set You Apart

• Previous experience as a founding or first product hire.
• Experience at a Seed or Series A startup.
• Background working on AI-powered products, developer tools, SaaS, or technically complex platforms.
• Previous entrepreneurial experience or experience founding your own company.
• Strong understanding of product-led growth and go-to-market strategy.
• Experience establishing product-market fit and scaling products through early growth stages.
• Ability to prototype, experiment, and leverage modern AI tools to accelerate product development.

Why This Opportunity?

True Ownership: You'll have a direct influence on what gets built, how it's built, and where the product goes.

Founder-Level Exposure: Work alongside ambitious founders and contribute to some of the company's most important strategic decisions.

Build Something From Scratch: Shape an early-stage product without the bureaucracy or limitations of a mature organization.

Meaningful Equity: Participate in the upside of helping build a successful business.

High-Impact Environment: Join a small, talented team where your contributions will be visible and consequential.

Who Will Succeed Here?

The ideal candidate is equal parts strategist, builder, and operator.

You're someone who enjoys solving messy problems, asking difficult questions, and moving rapidly from concept to execution. You don't need a large organization or a perfectly defined roadmap to be effective.

You thrive when given ownership, you care deeply about the customer, and you have the technical curiosity to challenge assumptions and push ideas forward.