Product Manager

Posted 6 Days Ago
San Francisco, CA, USA
In-Office
150K-190K Annually
Senior level
News + Entertainment
Inkitt believes that every author should have an equal chance to succeed.
The Role
Own a consumer app or product area end to end, including roadmap, backlog, revenue, retention, feature ideation, opportunity sizing, execution, launches, and A/B testing. The role requires independently analyzing data, pitching high-impact ideas, partnering with design and engineering, and measuring results against forecasts. Product ownership may shift across Inkitt’s Galatea, CandyJar, Ironblood, and Inkitt platforms based on portfolio needs. This is a fully onsite role in San Francisco.
Summary Generated by Built In

Inkitt is building the Disney of the 21st Century, standing at the forefront of technology and entertainment. Leveraging AI and predictive algorithms, Inkitt discovers unknown stories and turns them into blockbuster hits, producing a new $1M ebook every 7 days and selling directly to consumers through its Inkitt Galatea app. Bestsellers are then translated onto the screen through Inkitt CandyJar, the #1 US-based microdrama platform with billions of episodes streamed to date. Inkitt has become the 11th most bestseller-generating publisher in the world, boasting a 40x higher hit-rate than traditional publishers. Backed by some of the top VC’s such as: Khosla, Kleiner Perkins, and NEA Ventures, our recent expansion into Ironblood, the first AI Native streaming platform for action and adventure, is only the beginning of our journey to becoming the next-gen entertainment powerhouse.

 

Which product you'll own

We run four consumer products and we are hiring product managers for all of them.

  • Galatea — serialized fiction, millions of readers, coins and subscription
  • CandyJar — the #1 US-based microdrama platform, billions of episodes streamed
  • Ironblood — our new AI-native streaming platform for action and adventure
  • Inkitt — the writing and discovery platform underneath all of it, where the stories come from

We decide which one you own at the point you start, not at the point you apply. When you join, we look at where the largest metric gap is across the portfolio and put you there. As the team grows, areas get reshuffled — people move to where the biggest problem is.

We are telling you this up front because it is a real feature of working here, and because it does not suit everyone. If you want to own one named surface for three years, this is the wrong company. Some of our strongest product managers were hired for one thing and were doing something else entirely within a year — including one who was brought in to build internal tooling and ended up launching CandyJar from zero.


How We Work — please read this part carefully

This role works differently from most product jobs, and the difference matters more than anything else on this page.

Ali, our founder and CEO, sets company priorities. You own the ideas. You will own an app or area end to end, and you will spend part of every day researching competitors, the industry and our users to generate new feature ideas. Every product manager here keeps a live Top 3 list of the highest-impact ideas for their area — a new idea only enters that list by beating one already on it.

You pitch ideas to Ali on a single slide with a rough impact calculation attached. He rejects the ones that will not move the number enough to justify building them. That happens often, to everyone, and it is not a signal that anything has gone wrong.

Once an idea is approved, you own execution: spec, design, engineering, launch, and the A/B test. You release and ramp tests on your own judgement. Four weeks after launch, every feature is reviewed against the impact you predicted before you built it.

Your performance is measured on exactly two things: how often you beat your own Top 3, and the realised impact of what you ship.

If that sounds like the job you want, the rest of this page is for you.

What You'll Do:

  • Own an app or area end to end — the roadmap, the backlog, the revenue and retention of it
  • Generate the ideas. Research competitors, the market and our users daily, and keep a ranked Top 3 that you are constantly trying to beat
  • Build the impact case before you build the feature: size the opportunity, show the maths, defend the number
  • Pitch to Ali, take the rejection, sharpen it, come back
  • Drive approved work through spec, design, engineering, QA and launch
  • Design and run A/B tests, ramp them responsibly, and read the results honestly — including when you lost
  • Publish what you learn, wins and losses alike, to the whole company
  • Hit the impact you predicted

What You'll Bring:

  • 4–10 years of professional experience. We do not require a set number of years with the title “product manager.” Several of our strongest PMs arrived with one to three, and one of our best had none at all.
  • At least one role, in any function, in a business where money changed hands frequently and directly — subscriptions, in-app purchases, payments, pricing, marketplaces, live operations, lifecycle marketing. We care that you have seen how revenue actually behaves, not that you have the product vocabulary for it. Analysts, BD, CRM, payments operations and growth marketers are all welcome here.
  • Numbers you produce yourself. You can size an opportunity, build the model, and write the SQL or the spreadsheet underneath it. You do not wait for an analyst to tell you whether something worked.
  • Evidence you have moved toward the product rather than the title — a lateral or downward title move to get closer to building something, or two or three functions inside one company.
  • Something you started that nobody asked you to start. A side project, a club, a process, a business, a team you created because it needed to exist.
  • Shipped work with numbers attached. Tell us what moved and by how much.
  • Consumer product instinct and real UX judgement.
  • Based in San Francisco. This role is five days a week onsite.
  • Nice to have: free-to-play games, serialized fiction, short-form video, audio or another high-frequency consumer content business; coins, virtual currency, offer design or live operations; mobile; a founder or first-employee stint.

Who We Are Looking For:

  • Generates ideas rather than waiting for them
  • Brings solutions instead of problems
  • Data driven — and does the analysis themselves
  • Quick to action
  • Takes direct feedback well and gives it
  • Comfortable being measured against their own forecast
  • Happy to be moved to wherever the biggest problem is
  • Looking for exponential career growth
  • Have lots of fun building a generational AI x Entertainment company

What We'll Offer:

  • 401k plan, designed to help you save for the future
  • Health benefits tailored to your needs, including medical, dental, and vision coverage
  • Professional coaching for everyone
  • Team-building events, including our annual Tulum trip
  • Unlimited access to our Galatea app and CandyJar app. 
  • Unlimited budget for self-development books
  • Charity donation of your choice at your one year anniversary
  • Free lunch in office everyday
  • Class Pass membership for US based employee and gym access for Berlin employees
  • Dog-friendly offices in Berlin and San Francisco

At Inkitt, we strive to build a company culture and provide employment opportunities based on diversity and inclusion. We believe every author should have an equal opportunity to succeed, as should our team members. As a growing team from 20+ countries, we welcome everyone to apply. 
 
We look forward to hearing from you!
 
Check out our Careers Blog 💼
Follow us on Instagram & LinkedIn! 💻 

Skills Required

  • 4–10 years of professional experience
  • Experience in a business with frequent direct transactions, such as subscriptions, in-app purchases, payments, pricing, marketplaces, live operations, or lifecycle marketing
  • Ability to size opportunities, build models, and independently produce analysis using SQL or spreadsheets
  • Evidence of moving toward product building rather than pursuing title progression, such as a lateral or downward title move or experience across multiple functions
  • Experience starting an initiative, project, club, process, business, or team without being asked
  • Shipped work with measurable business or product results
  • Consumer product instinct and strong UX judgment
  • Based in San Francisco and available to work onsite five days per week
  • Experience with free-to-play games, serialized fiction, short-form video, audio, or another high-frequency consumer content business
  • Experience with coins, virtual currency, offer design, or live operations
  • Mobile product experience
  • Founder or first-employee experience
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The Company
HQ: Berlin
85 Employees
Year Founded: 2013

What We Do

Inkitt is a pioneer at the forefront of Data Driven Publishing. Using an analytic and objective approach, we’ve discovered hundreds of talented authors around the world with over 50% of our published authors achieving $100,000+ in sales. We have forever changed the traditional publishing model by inventing an algorithm which analyzes users' reading behavior to identify hits, in turn removing subjectivity from the equation. This gives Inkitt the unique ability to discover hidden talents that might otherwise have gone unnoticed.

Why Work With Us

We are on a mission to discover hidden talents and turn them into globally successful authors. At Inkitt, we strive to build a company culture and provide employment opportunities based on diversity and inclusion. We believe every author should have an equal opportunity to succeed, as should our team members.

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