Product Lead, Explore
$200,000–$220,000 year
HybridSan Mateo, California, United States
Job Summary
Own the Explore product end-to-end, defining transfer pathways, rules management, articulation, and admissions workflows from the ground up. Conduct deep partner discovery at university institutions to identify high-leverage problems and build a roadmap that earns trust with partners and leadership. Work daily with engineering teams in the US and Pakistan to resolve architecture trade-offs and sequence builds, while recognizing common threads across institutions to design scalable solutions. Balance immediate execution with long-term platform vision, making directional calls with incomplete information to drive product decisions.
Required Qualifications
- 6+ years of PM experience with demonstrable growth in scope and ownership over time
- True 0→1 experience — you've defined a product problem from nothing, built conviction around a solution, and shipped something real
- Comfort with ambiguity — you don't need a clear spec to get started; you know how to structure discovery, form hypotheses, and make directional calls with incomplete information
- Strong partner instincts — you're at home in customer conversations, you ask better questions than most, and you translate what you hear into product decisions rather than feature lists
- Technical depth without needing to write code — comfortable in architecture discussions and able to think through how decisions made today constrain or enable what's possible tomorrow
- An ownership mindset — on an early-stage product, everything is your problem; you don't wait to be asked
- Clear, engaging communication — with university partners, engineers, and leadership; you can make a fuzzy problem feel structured and a hard trade-off feel obvious
- Candidates must be willing to work in-office in San Mateo 2-3 days per week as part of our hybrid work culture
Desired Qualifications
- You've built products from scratch before — not contributed to someone else's vision, but started with a problem and figured out what to build
- You're energized by ambiguity rather than paralyzed by it, and you know how to balance deep partner discovery with the conviction to make calls before all the data is in
- You move fast, you learn constantly, and you hold yourself accountable for the outcome, not just the output
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