Principal Product Manager — Ecosystem

Fanatics operates as a set of separate companies — Betting & Gaming, Commerce, Collectibles, Live, Retail — that happen to share the same fans. Our team's job is to make those companies feel like one thing to a fan: one identity, one loyalty currency, one set of habits, and a platform underneath that means we build an experience once and deploy it everywhere.

This is the widest product seat we have. It runs from the surfaces a fan actually touches — the Fanatics app, scores, free-to-play, the places loyalty shows up — down to the infrastructure that makes any of it work across five businesses. You'll own both ends, and the connection between them is where most of the value is.

It is also the role we point at the hardest open problem in the ecosystem. When something matters and nobody owns it, or someone owns it and it's stuck, you go in, get deep enough to actually solve it, and then either keep it or hand it off cleanly and move to the next one.

If you want one product area and a settled roadmap, this is the wrong job. If the best work you've done was the work nobody had scoped yet, keep reading.

The Fanatics app and the daily habit

The app is the front door to the ecosystem for millions of fans, and scores are why a lot of them open it. A scores product on its own is a utility. The opportunity is a daily habit that earns the right to be the first app someone checks, and then carries them into everything else we do. You'll own the questions that decide whether that happens: what a fan sees first, what brings them back tomorrow, and how following a game turns into a bet, a card, a ticket or a conversation with their friends without feeling like a funnel.

How we get fans in

Registration, onboarding and the first session. Cross-sell that works because it's relevant rather than because someone bought a merchandising slot. Referral and invite mechanics. A single login across every product — which is a growth number for us, not a hygiene metric, because every extra front door a fan has to sign up at costs us a share of them.

How we keep them

Habit loops, and being honest about which of ours actually loop. What gives a fan a reason to open something on a Tuesday in February. Notifications that earn their place rather than spend down our credibility. Cohort retention by product and by entry point, and the work of finding where we lose people and fixing it rather than reporting it.

Free-to-play

Free-to-play is the workhorse of this ecosystem. It's the top of the funnel for regulated products, the thing that still works in states where we can't take a bet, the mechanic that keeps a fan engaged between wagers, and the lowest-risk way for someone to learn how our products work. You'll own where it goes next: game design, cadence, prizing, how it ladders into the paid products, and what it's genuinely worth as an acquisition and retention channel rather than what we assume it's worth.

How loyalty shows up

FanCash is the currency that connects the ecosystem, and most of its value is in how it surfaces in-product. There is a large gap between a loyalty programme that exists and one a fan can feel. You'll own the earn and burn moments inside the apps, how the bonus engine shows up on each surface, and whether a fan actually understands what they've got and what it's for. This is where loyalty either compounds or stays a line item in a settings menu.

Scaling the infrastructure — build once, deploy everywhere

Identity, the shared SDK and our common components exist so that five businesses stop building the same thing five times. You'll own pieces of that platform and, harder, its adoption: persuading op-co teams to take a shared component instead of writing their own, and making it good enough that taking it is the obvious choice. You'll also be in the room on scale — what breaks at ten times the traffic, where the service boundaries should sit, and what we need to build now so that 2027 isn't a rewrite.

The biggest problems in the ecosystem

The rest of the role is the swing mandate. The ecosystem generates more high-value, unscoped problems than we have people to point at them. You'll take the ones that matter most, go deep enough to solve them rather than triage them, and then either keep the area or hand it over

• Fanatics really does operate as separate companies, with their own P&Ls, roadmaps and priorities. You'll have significant influence and almost no authority. If that sounds like an excuse for things not moving, this will be frustrating. If it sounds like the interesting part, you'll do well here.

• Breadth is the risk as well as the appeal. Spread across everything and you add nothing. A real part of this job is refusing work and being able to defend the refusal to people who outrank you.

• FanCash and free-to-play straddle betting/gaming and commerce, which means legal and compliance constraints that vary by state, by product and sometimes by partner. Some of your best ideas will die on regulatory grounds. You'll need to find the next-best version quickly and without sulking about it.

• Inbound demand far exceeds capacity. Deciding what we won't do is most of the prioritisation work.

• Data and analytics maturity in this area is a known gap. We'd like the person in this seat to help close it rather than wait for someone else to.

• Fanatics ONE account growth

• Retention and repeat-visit rates in the app

• Free-to-play participation, and its measured contribution to acquisition and retention of the paid products

• FanCash earned and burned, the number of op-cos where FanCash is usable, and whether fans understand what they've earned

• Shared component adoption, measured in duplicate builds avoided

• Rate at which fans move from a first product into a second and third

• Decision quality in the areas you own

The combination we're after is rare, and it's the whole point of the role: someone who has built consumer products that fans love and platform products that other teams depend on.

• Eight or more years in product, with genuine consumer product ownership and genuine platform or infrastructure ownership. Both — not one with exposure to the other

• Range, evidenced. You've owned meaningfully different problems, and you get useful in an unfamiliar domain in weeks rather than quarters

• You've carried acquisition or retention numbers and can defend what actually moved them

• Technical depth to be a real partner to platform engineering: APIs, SDKs, authentication and identity flows, data models, service boundaries, and what breaks under load. You don't need to have written the code. You do need to hold your own in a design review and know when an estimate sounds wrong

• Data fluency you can demonstrate. You write your own queries, you design experiments that answer the question you actually have, and you know the difference between a metric moving and a metric mattering

• Cross-organisational influence where you owned the outcome but not the roadmap. Multi-brand, multi-P&L, holding-company, super-app or marketplace environments are directly relevant

• Comfort in a regulated environment. You've shipped inside legal and compliance constraints and treated compliance partners as collaborators rather than obstacles

• Writing strong enough to carry a decision without you in the room. This matters more here than in most PM jobs

• Low ego and a bias to action. You pick things up, you close them out, and you don't need credit assigned before you'll start

• The judgment to go deep on the right thing — and, harder, to stop working on the wrong one

• A consumer app where you owned a daily-habit or retention metric and moved it, with the curve to show it

• Free-to-play, fantasy, predictions or games-of-skill experience, especially where it fed a paid product

• Loyalty, rewards or membership experience across multiple brands, including the economics: liability, breakage, margin, and what a point is actually worth

• You've built or scaled an identity, auth or accounts platform used by several products

• You've driven internal adoption of a shared platform against teams who'd rather build their own — and can describe exactly how you won

• You've been handed the ambiguous, politically complicated problem more than once, on purpose

• You've killed something you built

• You've worked somewhere the ecosystem was the product: a super-app, a multi-vertical marketplace, a multi-brand membership programme

• A document you wrote that changed what a company decided to do

• You want a single product area and a settled roadmap

• You need authority to be effective

• You're a consumer PM who thinks platform work is a step down, or a platform PM who'd rather not talk to fans

• You read "wide" as permission not to go deep. This role needs both, and the depth is the harder half

• You're uncomfortable working on someone else's priority when it's clearly the right thing for the ecosystem

• You'd rather own a roadmap than solve a problem

• The widest view of the Fanatics ecosystem of any product seat we have, and the shortest path to seeing your work in front of millions of fans

• You'll own consumer surfaces and the platform underneath them, which very few product jobs let you do

• Real scope now, and a clear path to owning a charter of your own

• You'll work directly with the person running the area, with their air cover

• Identity, loyalty and the app are the things every op-co needs, which means your work compounds instead of shipping once and going quiet

• One of the largest fan bases in sports, and a genuine chance to make five companies feel like one