Senior Product Manager, Studio Team

Role Description

GameChanger is launching a Studio team, a small, fast-moving group whose job is to answer one question: is this opportunity worth pursuing? Partnering with our Strategy team, the Studio takes new and emerging business ideas, like expanding into a new sport or entering an international market, and rapidly validates them with real customers. This lets us commit to the right bets faster and stop sitting on promising ideas because we lack evidence.

As the founding product manager on this team, you'll pair with a designer to run focused validation sprints. Unlike a traditional product management role, your output isn't a shipped feature or a roadmap of releases. It's confidence: a clear, evidence-backed recommendation on whether an opportunity deserves deeper investment and handoff to a product team, or whether we should walk away and move on to the next idea. You'll operate more like a founder than a feature owner, with no large embedded team behind you, pulling in partners from User Research, Strategy, Data & Analytics, Product, Engineering, and beyond when the work demands it. You will report directly to our SVP of Product.

What You'll Do:

• Opportunity framing: Partner with the Strategy team to translate emerging business ideas into sharp, testable hypotheses. Define the riskiest assumptions, what "validated" looks like, and what evidence would change our minds before any work begins.
• Validation sprints: Run the Studio's operating cadence with your design partner. Scope each sprint tightly, choose the fastest credible path to an answer, and keep the team moving instead of polishing.
• Market and business analysis: Size opportunities, model potential business cases, analyze competitive and market dynamics, and pressure-test whether an idea can work commercially, not just whether customers like it.
• Customer evidence: Get in front of real coaches, players, families, and prospective customers alongside your designer, whether that means surveys, interviews, onsite ethnographic research, demand tests, or prototypes in market.
• Recommendations: Synthesize customer evidence and business analysis into crisp go/no-go recommendations for leadership, including the honest recommendation to not pursue something. Package validated opportunities for a smooth handoff to a product team to build.
• Team building: Help define how the Studio operates. As a founding member, you'll shape the playbook, the sprint cadence, the decision framework, and the standard for what "enough confidence" means.
• Leverage AI: Use AI tools aggressively across research synthesis, analysis, and prototyping support so a two-person team can evaluate far more than its size suggests.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience managing technology products, with a focus on mobile or consumer products, ideally including 0-to-1 work such as early-stage startups, new product incubation, or founding a company of your own.
• A strategic, business-minded thinker. You're as comfortable sizing a market and building a lightweight business case as you are talking to customers, and you care as much about whether we should pursue something as how we would.
• Entrepreneurial, self-motivated, and a doer. You don't wait for a mandate, a researcher, or an analyst. You figure out the fastest path to an answer and go get it yourself.
• Comfortable being on a bit of an island. You thrive with high autonomy and ambiguity, and you proactively pull in collaborators rather than waiting for a team to form around you.
• Experienced with data-informed decision-making, and capable of running your own analysis to size opportunities and interpret experiment results.
• Skilled at customer discovery. You can plan, recruit for, and conduct interviews and lightweight research without a dedicated research team.
• A strong communicator who can distill messy, ambiguous findings into a clear narrative, recommendation, and tradeoffs for executives, and who builds relationships and influence across all levels of the organization.
• Intellectually honest. You're motivated by finding the truth about an opportunity, not by making every idea look like a winner, and you're comfortable recommending we kill something you worked hard on.
• Fluent with (or hungry to master) AI tools for research, analysis, and rapid prototyping, and excited about how they let a small team punch far above its weight.
• Knowledgeable about (or passionate about learning) sports and the communities around them.

Bonus Points

• You've founded or worked at an early-stage startup, or on an incubation, venture, or new bets team.
• Experience evaluating international expansion or entirely new market opportunities.
• Background in strategy, consulting, or corporate development that sharpened your market analysis and business modeling skills.

Benefits

• Work remotely throughout the US* or from our well-furnished, modern office in Manhattan, NY.
• Unlimited vacation policy.
• Paid volunteer opportunities.
• Technology stipend - $4,000 every 2 years after your start to make sure you have the latest and greatest technology.
• WFH stipend - $500 annually to make your WFH situation comfortable.
• Monthly physical, mental, wellness & learning stipend offered through Holisticly.
• Monthly lifestyle stipend offered through Fringe.
• Full health benefits - medical, dental, vision, prescription, FSA, HRA, HSA, and coverage for family/dependents.
• Retirement savings - Traditional and Roth 401K plans are offered through Vanguard, with an immediate company match.
• Life insurance - basic life, supplemental life, and dependent life.
• Disability leave - short-term disability and long-term disability.
• Company paid parental leave - up to 20 weeks for birthing parents and up to 12 weeks for non-birthing parents.
• Family building benefits offered through Progyny.
• DICK'S Sporting Goods and their family of brands teammate discount.

Salary Information

The target salary range for this position is between $160,000 and $180,000. This is part of a total compensation package that includes incentive, equity, and benefits for eligible roles. Individual pay may vary from the target range and is determined by several factors including experience, internal pay equity, and other relevant business considerations. We constantly review all teammate pay to ensure a great compensation package that is fair and equal across the board.

* DICK'S Sporting Goods has company-wide practices to monitor and protect the company from significant compliance and monetary implications as it pertains to employer state tax liabilities. Due to said guidelines put in place, we are unable to hire in AK, DE, HI, IA, LA, MS, MT, OK, and SC.

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity in our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

IMPORTANT NOTICE: All official recruitment communications from GameChanger will come from an email address ending in @gc.com or View email address on us.fitly.work. If you receive communication from any other domain, please be cautious, as it is likely fraudulent.