Staff / Principal Product Manager, Inkitt
$190-225k
5 days a week in office
Reader-powered book publisher
Be an early applicant
Reader-powered book publisher
201-500 employees
Be an early applicant
$190-225k
5 days a week in office
201-500 employees
Company mission
To build a world-class platform to shine a light on phenomenal stories, and eventually develop theses stories into movies, TV shows, merchandise, video games, or even them parks.
Role
Who you are
- 8+ years of professional experience, with deep, demonstrable ownership of consumer product where users pay directly and often. We measure years on the job, not years holding a particular title
- You are useful in week two. You have built and owned the kind of surface this portfolio needs — paywalls, pricing, coins and offers, retention loops, onboarding — at real scale, and can start contributing before you have been fully onboarded
- Exceptional analytical ability. Advanced SQL. You build your own models and you check other people’s
- A track record of revenue impact you can quantify, with the methodology behind it
- Comfort operating as a hands-on individual contributor. This seat has no direct reports
- Based in San Francisco. This role is five days a week onsite
- Nice to have: free-to-play games, serialized fiction, short-form video or audio; coins, virtual currency, offer design or live operations; a founder or first-employee stint
- Autonomous on execution, collaborative on direction
- 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, gives it directly, and does not need to be handled
- Comfortable being measured against their own forecast
- Happy to be moved to wherever the biggest problem is
- Have lots of fun building a generational AI x Entertainment company
What the job involves
- 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
- 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 say this plainly because at this level it is the most common reason a hire does not work out. If you need to own one named domain indefinitely, or your value depends on a particular surface staying yours, this will frustrate you
- This role works differently from most senior product jobs, and the difference is the single biggest predictor of whether someone succeeds here
- Ali, our founder and CEO, sets company priorities. You own the ideas. You will spend part of every day researching competitors, the industry and our users to generate new feature ideas, and you will keep a live Top 3 list of the highest-impact ideas for your area — a new idea only enters by beating one already on it
- You pitch on a single slide with an impact calculation attached. Anything over a week of engineering needs a methodical business case demonstrating ROI. Ali rejects ideas that will not move the number enough to justify the build, and he does so often. The loop is pitch, get rejected, sharpen, re-pitch — continuously, alongside delivery
- Once approved, you own execution outright, including release and A/B ramping. Four weeks after launch, every feature is reviewed against the impact you predicted before you built it. You cannot inflate a forecast to win approval, because the forecast becomes your scorecard
- Your performance is measured on two things: how often you beat your own Top 3, and the realised impact of what you ship
- This is not a role where a roadmap is handed to you and you are judged on delivering it. If that is the job you are looking for, this will frustrate you, and we would rather you knew now
- Own a product line end to end, including the revenue attached to it
- Set the idea agenda for your area and defend it with numbers
- Build rigorous business cases for anything substantial, and be right often enough that the bar keeps rising
- Drive work through spec, design, engineering, QA and launch at a cadence most companies would consider unreasonable
- Design and run experiments, ramp them on your own judgement, and report results honestly including failures
- Raise the standard of product thinking around you — your pitches, specs and post-mortems become the reference the rest of the team works from
- Hit the impact you predicted
Our take
The current publishing industry makes it very difficult for breakout authors to achieve success. Furthermore, publications are often based off subjective opinions of those in the industry, and potential readers have no input in the matter, despite them being the force that will drive a book's success.
Inkitt takes a different approach to publishing in order to give writers a fairer chance of success. The company allows writers to submit their stories onto the website where readers have free access to read anything posted. Using an algorithm, Inkitt then determines which stories have the most reader engagement, and based on this information, decides which to take to official print and publication.
Several rounds of funding to the sum of more than $100M have allowed Inkitt to invest more in its algorithm and technology and open offices in San Francisco. It's also looking to expand into more mediums such as video content and audiobooks, with a long-term aim of building a media empire akin to Disney. Though there's a long way to go for that lofty aim to come to fruition, Inkitt has already attracted 33M users and published dozens of bestsellers.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
-2% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 5 rounds)
Feb 2024
$37m
SERIES C
Oct 2021
$59m
SERIES B
Total funding: $117.3m
Company benefits
- Comprehensive Health Plans including Fitness Classes
- Expat integration support
- Free lunches in the office
- Professional Coaching for Everyone + unlimited self-development book budget
- Regular social events
- Dog-friendly office
Company HQ
China Basin, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Ali Albazaz
(Founder & CEO)Founder and CEO of Fünfi and then joined moviepilot as a Javascript developer. After this, Albazaz freelanced as a Javascript developer for six years.
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