Product Manager - Digital Audience Growth and Engagement

Job Description

Hearst Television is looking for a growth-focused Product Manager to drive audience expansion and deepen loyalty across our multi-platform digital ecosystem. While our platforms reach millions, your mission is to convert casual visitors into a loyal, engaged audience. You will lead the experimentation roadmap, optimizing the journey from a user's first discovery of a Hearst story to becoming a daily active habit.

Reporting to the Director of Digital Growth Initiatives, you will sit at the intersection of product, engineering, and editorial. You are a specialist in the "Growth Loop"-using data to identify friction points, running A/B tests to drive engagement, and building features that keep our audience coming back during the news cycles that matter most.

This role is well suited for a highly proactive product manager who thrives in ambiguity, identifies opportunities independently, and moves quickly from insight to action. You'll be expected to proactively surface hypotheses, propose experiments, and drive execution across multiple teams-often before a problem is fully defined.

Core Responsibilities

• Strategic Experimentation : Own the ideation, execution, and analysis of the growth experimentation roadmap. Build, test, and scale features designed to increase Recency, Frequency, and Monetary value (RFM) of our audience.
• Engagement Strategy : Identify and develop features that encourage deeper content consumption, such as personalized feeds, "follow" mechanics, and saved content.
• Lifecycle Optimization & ESP Management: Own the technical health and strategy of our user lifecycle. This includes optimizing app onboarding, newsletter acquisition funnels, and managing the configuration of our ESP (e.g., Braze) to ensure high deliverability and personalized user journeys.
• Behavioral Data Analysis : Go beyond "system health" to "user health." Monitor churn signals and engagement cohorts to identify whitespace opportunities for new growth features.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration : Partner with the Newsroom, Data and Engineering teams to align product features with audience acquisition campaigns and editorial tentpoles (e.g., Election cycles, Severe Weather).
• Backlog & Requirement Engineering : Translate complex stakeholder needs and newsroom requirements into actionable user stories with clear technical acceptance criteria.
• Agile Delivery for Growth : Manage a high-velocity backlog of growth-oriented user stories, prioritizing initiatives that promise the highest impact on DAU/MAU and retention metrics.

Technical Competencies & Skills

• Engagement & MarTech Architecture (Braze/Iterable/Airship) : Advanced proficiency in configuring engagement platforms. You understand Liquid logic, API-triggered campaigns, and webhook integrations. You can navigate the technical nuances of push notification payloads, including deep-linking, media attachments, and TTL (Time-to-Live) settings.
• Retention & CRM Tooling: Deep experience with automated, behavior-triggered messaging journeys. You understand how to map user events from the app/web layers to the CRM to trigger real-time, contextually relevant interactions.
• T esting & Analytics: Mastery of A/B testing frameworks and behavioral analytics tools (e.g., GA4, Mixpanel, Amplitude, Maze) to validate hypotheses and measure incrementality.
• SEO & Discovery : Foundational understanding of how product choices impact search visibility and social discovery, driving "top-of-funnel" organic growth.
• Personalization & AI: Familiarity with recommendation engines and how to leverage AI/ML to deliver the right content to the right user at the right time.
• Modern Growth Stack: Proficiency in Jira/Confluence for workflow and a strong grasp of data visualization tools (e.g., Looker, PowerBI) to communicate growth wins to leadership.

Experience & Qualifications

• Experience : 4-6 years in Product Management, with a clear focus on Growth, Retention, or Consumer Engagement (Digital Media or News experience is a major plus).
• Growth Architect : Proven ability to not just execute tickets, but to define the "What" and the "Why" behind a growth roadmap based on competitive gaps and user data.
• Analytical Storytelling : Exceptional ability to turn complex cohort data into clear narratives for stakeholders, explaining not just what happened, but why it matters for Hearst's bottom line.
• Track Record : Demonstrated success in moving the needle on a core business KPIs (e.g., 10% increase in Day-30 retention or 20% growth in authenticated users).
• User Advocacy : A passionate defender of the user experience who understands that true growth comes from providing value, not just "growth hacks".

Compensation

The salary for this role is $110,000-$165,000. The actual base pay offered is dependent upon many factors, such as transferable skills, work experience, business needs, market demands and conditions, including geographic location where the work will be performed, and other factors permitted by law. The base pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future.


Values in Action

At Hearst Television we tell stories every day. Stories about people of all backgrounds, perspectives, and identities. That's why, behind the scenes, we believe in being an organization that fosters collaboration and open communication, ensuring that the content we create is authentic, accurate, and connected to the communities we serve.

Benefits

Hearst's benefit programs are modern, flexible and designed to focus on you. As a Hearst employee, you and your spouse or partner or dependents would have access to the following benefits.

• Medical | Dental | Vision
• 401(k) matching
• Emotional Wellness Support
• Paid Time Off
• Paid Parental Leave
• LGBTQ+ Health Services
• Additional benefits to meet your and your family's needs

About Us

Hearst Television (HTV) owns and/or operates 35 television and two radio stations serving 27 media markets across 39 states reaching over 22 million U.S. television households. HTV is recognized as one of the industry's premier broadcasting companies and has been honored with numerous awards for distinguished journalism, industry innovation, and community service.

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer. we do not discriminate in hiring on the basis of sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, color, religion, creed, national, origin, physical or mental disability, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local law.