Senior Growth Product Manager, Conversion & Monetization (Consumer AI App)

About the role -We're a consumer AI startup with a creator-led companion app, paying subscribers and token purchases. We have traffic, a strong engineering team, and a product users love. What we don't have is one person who wakes up every day owning the path from new user to paying user to repeat buyer. -This is that role. You own conversion and monetization across the funnel. You work directly with the CEO, the engineering lead and a senior UX/AI teammate. You run tests weekly, publish a scorecard, and tell us what's working and what to kill. -This is a contract-to-hire position. Strong results in 60 days lead to a full-time offer with equity and expanded scope. What you own • Signup to first value: onboarding flow, first session, activation triggers • Paywall and offers: placement, copy, timing, what we show and when we ask • Pricing tests: subscriptions, token packs, trials, discounts (final pricing signed off with the CFO) • Checkout conversion: drop-off diagnosis, working with the payments team on approval rates • Retention and repeat purchase: day-1 and day-7 activation, habit loops, win-back • The scorecard: one weekly view of the funnel, owned and published by you • The experiment backlog: a ranked list of tests, what we stopped, and why Not yours: paid acquisition, creator partnerships, engineering architecture, visual design. You work closely with each of those owners. How you work with the team • CEO: sets the big bets and the vision. You turn each bet into a cheap test and report the honest result, even when it hurts. • Engineering lead: you give him a ranked list every Thursday with the what and the why. You protect sprint scope. You don't tell him how to build. • UX and AI behavior lead: she owns how the product feels. You own what moves the number. You respect her craft and she sharpens your ideas. If she doesn't want to work with you, we don't hire you. • CFO: you bring pricing proposals with revenue impact. She approves within guardrails. • Data team: you write your own SQL and pull your own cohorts. The data team verifies and models. You don't wait on them for a basic answer. • Payments team: you flag where checkout drop-off hurts conversion. They fix processors and approval rates. Your first 60 days 1. Baseline the funnel: confirm the numbers, find the biggest leak 2. Ship at least 4 experiments that read cleanly at our volume 3. Publish a weekly scorecard the whole team uses 4. Target: meaningfully improve new-user conversion to paid Weekly rhythm • Monday: read last week's cohorts and test results. Call each test: ship, kill or extend. • Tuesday/Wednesday: watch session replays, read user conversations, write next test briefs • Thursday: rank next week's work with the engineering lead • Friday: publish the scorecard vs target and vs last week • Always: chase owners, close loops, nothing stalls more than 48 hours without a name on it Who you are Background • You've owned conversion, retention or ARPU at a paid consumer app: subscription, freemium, dating, gaming, fitness or creator platforms • You've worked at a startup with 10-30 people and no dedicated data team. Big-company PMs will drown here. • You've run paywall and pricing tests and can explain one that failed • You write your own SQL and build your own cohort analysis, including layered-cake cohorts (stacked by signup week, measured by behavior week) • You've built something yourself with Python, an LLM tool or a script. You don't wait on engineering for everything. Characteristics (these matter more than the resume) • Quiet confidence. Calm, steady, not loud. You don't need to prove you're the smartest person in the room. • Execution over ideas. You ship weekly. You follow through. You close loops. You are the opposite of an idea person. • Data over opinion. You push back with a number, once, then commit. You don't sulk when overruled. • Low ego, high ownership. You say "my number missed" without excuses. You don't need credit for ideas, including the CEO's. • Operationally intense. You live in the funnel, the cohorts, the session replays. You notice things other people miss. • Kind but direct. Quiet engineers won't speak up around you by default. You draw them out. Loud stakeholders get a straight answer. • Curious about users. You read real conversations, watch real sessions, talk to real customers. Dashboards are the summary, not the source. Red flags (we'll screen for these) • Talks vision more than numbers in the first 20 minutes • Can't name a test they ran that failed and what they learned • Blames engineering for slow shipping • Agrees with everything the CEO says. We need someone who pushes back. • Needs a big team, a data team or a designer before they can move Interview process 1. Written screen: start your proposal with the word "funnel" and tell us the single test that moved a conversion number the most 2. Case study: we give you a real (anonymized) funnel. You have 2 weeks and 2 engineers. What do you do? 3. SQL and cohort screen: 30 minutes, practical tables, build the query 4. Stakeholder interviews: engineering lead and UX lead each interview you separately. Each has a veto. 5. Reference check: "tell me a time they told the founder no and were right" Setup • Remote, 30-40 hours per week • At least 4 hours overlap with US Eastern time • Contract-to-hire: 60-day contract, full-time offer with equity on strong results • Product details shared on first call under NDA