Product Manager (design-led)

Compensation $150,000 – $170,000

Benefits: Premium health coverage, gym membership, daily meals, top hardware

Role: Visual Product Builder, a design-led Product Manager

The Mission At Subject, we're building the Netflix of Education - Personalized. Localized. Accredited. Backed by Owl Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, and industry leaders, and serving 150K+ students, we're building the world's most advanced Learning Intelligence System: studio-quality, standards-aligned learning that is delivered personally and proves outcomes.

The Impact As a Visual Product Builder at Subject, you own a product surface end-to-end: the strategy, the spec, the shipped feature, and the outcome it produces in real classrooms. You decide what gets built and why, and you have the design fluency to shape how it looks and feels rather than waiting on someone else to make it real. Your work determines whether students fall in love with learning and whether teachers feel the platform is actively working for them. You report to the Head of Product and are embedded inside one of Subject's core pods from day one.

What You'll Own Subject operates in focused pods, each owning one surface end-to-end.

1. Product Definition and Strategy

• Define what your pod builds: translate user insight, data signals, and strategic intent into clear, scoped features
• Write tight specs that give engineers confidence and leave no ambiguity on edge cases
• Own the pod roadmap: prioritize ruthlessly, justify tradeoffs, protect the bar on quality
• Run lightweight discovery: user interviews, session reviews, teacher walkthroughs, and close the loop between classroom reality and product decisions

1. Outcomes and Execution

• Set success metrics before you ship, monitor them after, and iterate toward the result
• Be the connective tissue between your engineers, content, GTM, and school partners
• Enable internal teams: brief support, write GTM materials, and prepare educators for launches
• Run retros and feed learnings back into the roadmap

1. AI-Native Building

• Define AI-powered features (personalization, grading assist, adaptive content) with a clear mental model of what the model can and cannot do
• Use AI tools fluently in your own workflow: faster prototyping, richer research synthesis, tighter iteration loops
• Help push the frontier on what AI-powered learning actually looks and feels like

1. Design Fluency and Experience Craft

• Move from concept to high-fidelity, production-ready screens yourself when that is the fastest path to clarity
• Hold the visual and UX bar: every screen that leaves your pod should feel intentional, premium, and student-first
• Prototype quickly and test with real users before committing engineering cycles
• Contribute to the Subject design system rather than working around it

Requirements

• 7+ years in product management, including features you scoped, shipped, and measured
• A track record of end-to-end ownership: research, definition, launch, and the metric that moved
• Demonstrated design capability: you can produce high-fidelity work in Figma
• Strong interaction sense. You think in states, motion, and edge cases
• Comfortable with data: you define what success looks like, read a dashboard, and change course based on what you find
• Clear communicator: your specs are readable, your rationale is tight, your stakeholder updates don't require translation
• Bonus: B2B SaaS, consumer learning, or AI-native products

The Mindset We Need

• Outcome bar: shipped is not the goal, the result in the classroom is
• Studio-quality craft: beautiful screens that don't work are not enough, and working screens that look mediocre are not enough either
• Full ownership: you feel the weight of your pod's surface, you don't hand off, you ship
• Speed with taste: you prototype fast, iterate in the open, and don't let perfect be the enemy of shipped-and-learning
• User obsession: you know your users by name and session. Student engagement data and teacher feedback are your primary inputs
• AI-native operator: you already use Claude Code, Cursor, or equivalent daily. AI is in your workflow, not on your wishlist

The Commitment We're Looking For This role requires exceptional dedication because students deserve our absolute best. We need someone who:

• Lives the mission and treats student and district outcomes as real stakes
• Thrives in intensity and takes pride in building something from nothing
• Takes end-to-end ownership: design, definition, delivery, results
• Works with presence: Los Angeles office, 5 days/week
• Can commit to 60 hours/week: this is a high-output, high-ownership role and the pace reflects the ambition

We're not looking for people who tolerate long hours — we're looking for people who find meaning in building something that matters this much.

Join Us If you want to own a product surface end-to-end - designing it, defining it, and proving it works in real classrooms - Subject is where you do that work.