Product Manager, Growth - Lifecycle Product - San Francisco - Full Time

Cantina Labs is a social AI company, developing a suite of advanced real-time models that push the boundaries of expression, personality, and realism. We bring characters to life, transforming how people tell stories, connect, and create. We build and power ecosystems. Cantina, our flagship social AI platform, is just the beginning.

If you're excited about the potential AI has to shape human creativity and social interactions, join us in building the future!

About the role

We're hiring a Lifecycle Product Manager to own how Cantina reaches users outside the app and brings them back to value inside it. Sitting on the product management team, you'll own the end-to-end user journey across email, push, and in-product messaging — and, critically, the deep-linked landing and post-click experiences that complete the loop. You'll develop a deep qualitative and quantitative understanding of how people move through Cantina, turn that into a lifecycle strategy that grows activation, retention, and resurrection, and partner with Data and Engineering to launch, measure, and compound improvements. This is a hands-on role with company-wide visibility: you'll write the strategy, ship the journeys, run the experiments, and bring senior stakeholders along.

What you'll do

• Own the lifecycle strategy and roadmap for Cantina's owned channels, mapping journeys across onboarding, activation, continuation, retention, resurrection, and monetization.
• Lead the design, launch, iteration, and optimization of templates and journeys across email, push, and in-product messaging — including the deep-linked landing and post-click product experiences that complete the loop.
• Optimize the lifecycle portfolio, not just individual sends: improve message inventory, relevance, personalization, prioritization, and per-user frequency so users get fewer, better-timed messages.
• Build a deep, evidence-based picture of the user journey — combining product analytics, cohort and funnel analysis with qualitative signals like session reviews, support themes, and user research — and use it to find where users stall and what would move them.
• Design and run experiments (A/B tests, holdouts, incrementality reads) and hold the bar on measurement: retained activity and incremental value, not opens and clicks.
• Partner with the Data team to build the measurement system behind lifecycle — instrumentation, eligibility and audience definitions, dashboards, and experiment readouts.
• Partner with Engineering to ship campaigns end to end: triggers, personalization payloads, deep links, and the in-product surfaces each journey lands on.
• Define the operating model — intake, templates, approvals, QA, and quality standards — so lifecycle scales across teams without channel chaos or user fatigue.
• Set and communicate strategy to senior stakeholders, translating a messy portfolio into a clear multi-quarter direction and defending tradeoffs with data.

What you'll bring

• 6+ years in product management, growth, lifecycle/CRM, or retention — ideally in a consumer mobile or AI product operating at scale.
• Demonstrated ownership of lifecycle or engagement programs that moved a real business metric (activation, D30 retention, resurrection, or conversion), with the analysis to prove it.
• Strong quantitative fluency: comfortable writing your own SQL and working in a BI/analytics tool (Mixpanel, Amplitude, Hex, Looker, or similar) to build funnels, cohorts, and retention curves without waiting on a queue.
• Hands-on experience with a lifecycle/CRM platform (Braze, Iterable, Customer.io or similar) — segmentation, triggered canvases, personalization, and deliverability.
• Rigorous experimentation judgment: you understand holdouts, incrementality, sample sizing, and the difference between a delivery metric and a value metric.
• Technical and product fluency across event and identity models, APIs, deep linking, and push/email infrastructure — enough to design a system with Engineering. Coding not required.
• Excellent written communication and cross-functional influence, with a track record of aligning senior stakeholders across Product, Engineering, Data, Design, and Marketing.
• Craft-level instinct for messaging: you can write the copy, critique the journey, and tell when a notification is helpful versus annoying.
• Preferred: experience with AI/consumer-social products, localization or multi-market lifecycle, and building lifecycle tooling or self-service platforms with Engineering.

Compensation

The anticipated annual base salary range for this role is between $175,000 - $250,000. When determining compensation, a number of factors will be considered, including skills, experience, job scope, location, and competitive compensation market data.

• Competitive salary and generous company equity
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance – 99.99% of premiums covered by Cantina
• 42 days of paid time off, including:
  • 15 PTO days
  • 10 sick days
  • 15 company holidays
  • 2 floating holidays
• Generous parental leave & fertility support
• 401(k) retirement savings plan
• Lifestyle spending account – $500/month to use however you’d like
• Complimentary lunch and snacks for in-office employees
• One Medical membership, and more!