Staff Product Manager - Payments
•NiumHybrid· 12h
📦 Product⏰ Full-time🎯 Lead / Principal💰 $154k-205k🇺🇸 San Francisco, USA
12h ago
Kovo·about 19 hours ago
Join an early-stage startup.
Accelerate economic opportunity.
Join us as our 2nd product hire!
You'll own the end-to-end customer journey as a product surface - from acquisition through activation, engagement, retention, referral, and reactivation - treating in-product experiences, lifecycle messaging, and growth experiments as one connected system.
You'll pioneer AI-native workflows and tooling to build growth and lifecycle systems that are faster, smarter, and more personalized than what's possible with traditional approaches. We believe AI fundamentally changes what a small team can do here, and you'll have the mandate and resources to prove that out.
You'll operate independently, drive clarity where it doesn't exist, and shape a function from the ground up.
Kovo is expanding access to financial tools for people historically excluded from the traditional credit system. We believe everyone deserves the opportunity for economic independence, and we're building products that help people establish financial identity and unlock opportunity.
Over the past three years, Kovo has grown revenue 20x while maintaining exceptional capital efficiency. We rank above the 99th percentile in revenue per employee benchmarks, reflecting the leverage of a small, high-performing team.
The team combines the ambition of a venture-scale company with the discipline of a profitable business. We reached positive free cash flow early in our lifecycle, allowing us to grow with less dilution and focus on building for the long term.
Kovo is backed by Inspired Capital and Homebrew, along with founders and leaders from Plaid, Column, Ramp, Affirm, Cash App, NerdWallet, Alloy, MoonPay, Uber, Etsy, LendingClub, and more. We're looking for exceptional people to help us scale the company another 20x and beyond.
Direct impact on millions of people's ability to access credit
High ownership with minimal bureaucracy
Speed, learning, and impact are core values
Roles and priorities evolve quickly
Some systems and processes are still being built
The pace of execution and career growth is intense (not optimized for work-life balance)
Own growth & lifecycle as a product surface
Own the strategy and roadmap for the full customer journey - activation, engagement, retention, referral, and reactivation - across in-product experiences and lifecycle messaging (email, push, in-app, sms).
Define the north star and input metrics for growth and lifecycle, and continuously optimize for measurable, incremental impact on revenue, retention, and LTV.
Partner with Engineering, Design, and Marketing to ship growth and lifecycle work as first-class product investments, not one-off campaigns.
Identify and prioritize the highest-leverage opportunities across the funnel, sequencing bets between in-product changes, lifecycle programs, and acquisition/conversion surfaces.
Build the lifecycle engine
Audit and evolve existing lifecycle programs across email, push, in-app, and sms messaging - to improve onboarding, engagement, retention, cross-sell, and reactivation.
Design and scale event-driven, behavior-triggered lifecycle programs tightly integrated with product events and user state.
Build and maintain a modular email design system / component library, leveraging AI tools to increase speed and quality.
Define segmentation and personalization strategy across the lifecycle, grounded in user behavior and predicted value.
Drive experimentation and conversion
Own conversion rate optimization across web/app acquisition flows, onboarding, lifecycle messaging, and key in-product moments.
Define the experimentation framework: hypothesis generation, prioritization, test design, sample sizing, readouts, and documented learnings.
Build a durable backlog of growth experiments and ensure learnings compound across the team.
Use AI to amplify the function
Explore and ship AI-powered workflows and proactive messaging agents to improve personalization, cross-sell, product discovery, and re-engagement.
Use AI to accelerate research, segmentation, copywriting, creative iteration, and analysis - treating it as a core capability, not a buzzword.
Push the boundaries of what a small growth and lifecycle team can do when AI is deeply embedded in the workflow.
Collaborate across teams
Partner closely with Product and Engineering to ensure growth and lifecycle work is treated as core product surface area.
Work with Engineering to instrument events cleanly, define metrics, and build the analytics foundation the function needs.
Coordinate with Design, CX, and Marketing on messaging, brand consistency, and customer-facing voice.
Mindset
Energized by helping underserved people build financial identity and unlock economic opportunity.
Self-starter who thrives in ambiguity, handles shifting priorities fluidly, and takes full ownership of outcomes.
Builder's mindset toward AI: you see it as a core capability and are eager to push the boundaries of what growth and lifecycle work can look like when AI is deeply embedded.
Comfortable in a high-intensity, remote environment with significant accountability and minimal scaffolding.
Think in terms of systems, behavioral triggers, and measurable incremental impact - not campaign sends.
Skills
4+ years or equivalent depth of experience in product management, growth, CRO or lifecycle/CRM roles in a high-growth consumer or fintech environment - including direct ownership of lifecycle or growth surface areas.
Track record of shipping measurable wins across activation, retention, monetization, or reactivation.
Strong product sense: can move fluidly between strategy, roadmap, spec-writing, and hands-on execution.
Comfortable with event-driven systems, product analytics tools, and modern lifecycle / CRM platforms.
Intermediate SQL proficiency and confidence designing and reading experiments.
Technically curious: comfortable with HTML-based email systems, component-driven frameworks, and willing to learn fast.
Strong written communication - you can write crisp specs, clear customer-facing copy, and concise experiment readouts.
Bonus: experience managing or contributing to marketing automation migrations or major tooling evolutions.
Bonus: experience standing up a growth or lifecycle function from scratch.