Lead Product Manager, Shopping Experience at Minted in San Francisco, CA

Job description

• As a digitally native company, Minted's Shopping Experience and commerce platform are core to the company's success. Minted's online shopping experience allows consumers to discover, customize, and purchase from an extensive assortment of products and categories, all designed by independent artists around the world. We are driven by creating a customer journey that serves both our artist community and the savvy e-commerce shopper.
• We are seeking a Lead Product Manager to own the strategy for how customers find and choose products on Minted. Over the next two years, we are integrating a new product information management platform, which will give us structured, machine-readable data about our product catalog. That data supports a set of experiences we cannot build today: search and browse that understand what a customer is looking for, product detail and category pages generated from product attributes, and filtered navigation that is fully crawlable. Combined with parallel investments in analytics, customer data, and content management, it is the foundation for conversational shopping and for deep personalization later. This role decides what we build on that foundation, in what order, and why.
• The role spans our discovery surfaces (search, browse, category, and product detail) and our conversion optimization program, with dependencies running into product data, customization and rendering, checkout, and marketing. You will set the strategy and objectives for your pod, lead initiatives that cross pod and functional boundaries, and raise the standard of product craft for the PMs around you.

Responsibilities

• Set the strategy for Minted's discovery experience in partnership with engineering and design: where to play and how to win across search, browse, category, and product detail. Derive it from business strategy, the competitive environment, behavioral data, test results, customer insight, and technical constraints and capabilities.
• Prioritize the growth levers that move our targets, then prioritize the customer problems that move those levers, then consider the solution space. Up-level the organization by holding that sequence when others want to start with solutions.
• Set the objectives, key results, roadmap, and initiative scope consistent with that strategy, along with the sequencing and the resourcing implications. Carry a two-year planning view alongside the near-term roadmap.
• Own and continuously maintain the prioritized list of customer problems across your surfaces, keeping it current with fresh behavioral data, user research, customer support and concierge signals, session replay, dogfooding, and competitive scans.
• Define the strategy for turning our new product data foundation into customer value, and lead its execution: attribute-driven search and browse, dynamic product detail and category pages, crawlable filtered navigation, and the groundwork for conversational shopping and deeply personalized discovery.
• Develop and lead initiative strategies that span multiple teams and functions, and resolve the dependencies and disagreements those initiatives create with other teams and with stakeholders.
• Shape solutions with engineering and design. You hold the business problem and the value case, design holds the experience, engineering holds feasibility and cost. Your job is to find the right-sized solution where the three meet.
• Argue for defensibility in addition to value. Ask whether a bet is hard for a competitor to copy and whether it improves margin, and be willing to kill an idea that does not clear the bar.
• Set a new standard for rationale and foresight with the briefs and documentation you produce, stating the assumptions, the growth lever, the customer problem, the success criteria, and the instrumentation plan explicitly.
• Specify the instrumentation for everything your team ships, including the events that power key metrics and KPIs and the tracking behind on-site clicks and interactions. Instrumentation is called out explicitly in the brief and ships with the work.
• Run a high-velocity test program across your surfaces. Design lean tests with the intent to launch and productionize them if they win. Evangelize the tenets of proper experiment design and lead by example in your understanding of what is working or not working, why, and what to do about it.
• Manage upward with clear strategic intent and a recommendation attached to every problem you raise, and get out in front of risks and stakeholder misalignment before they escalate.
• Be the trusted and accountable partner to your teammates and stakeholders. Run project kickoffs and read-outs, prioritize and revise the backlog through delivery, handle scope changes, prepare Customer Service and other affected teams ahead of launch, and run user acceptance testing to ensure quality output.
• Report results broadly against objectives and KPIs, share the insight across teams, and decide how each result reshapes your roadmap.
• Mentor and develop other product managers on their craft, and participate in hiring. Raise the standard for problem framing, briefs, instrumentation, and experiment analysis on the team around you.

Requirements

• Problem-first. You start with a clearly framed problem statement, align others on its priority and its connection to customer and business outcomes, and hold the line on agreeing on the top two or three problems before moving to solutions.
• A strategic, consumer-centric thinker. You have a theory of the customer. You can explain why a metric moved and what is happening inside the experience, grounded in behavioral data, research, and direct observation.
• Fluent in the business. You start from the objective and the margin logic, you can connect any experience change to the number it moves, and you understand how Minted makes money well enough to teach it.
• Data-driven. You own the metrics for your area, keep a continuous health check on them, and propose hypotheses to improve them.
• Realistic about win rates. Not every launch or experiment will win on the first try. You build time to iterate inside a problem space and treat a single test as a data point.
• A systems thinker. You understand how the tech stack, the data model, and the customer journey fit together, and you are technical enough to reason about feasibility, complexity, and architectural tradeoffs with engineers.
• Able to create clarity out of ambiguity. Given an unstructured pile of input from disparate sources, you produce a framework for the decision and a plan for execution.
• Effective without authority. You lead engineering and design partners, peer teams, and senior stakeholders through credibility, clear problem framing, narrative, and evidence. You understand a partner's goals before you negotiate a tradeoff, and you use data to settle the tension.
• Decisive. You break choices into explicit options so people know what is being decided, land the decision with an owner and a next step, and secure commitment from the people who disagreed.
• A multiplier. You coach and give feedback to other PMs, share credit, co-create with partners so they own the outcome with you, and let engineering and design lead in their own areas.
• Detail-oriented. You identify and resolve edge cases along with functional and aesthetic details to deliver a quality experience.
• Curious and gritty. You get into the details of real customer behavior, understand their motivations, and stay on a problem until you understand it.
• Accountable for your own output, including the parts AI helped produce. You use AI to think, elaborate, and stress-test your reasoning, but you own the judgment and the final artifact.
• Transparent and humble. You say what you do not know and what you got wrong. You invite partners to engage on the answer because the best outcomes happen when all viewpoints are considered.
• Bachelor's degree
• 8+ years of product management experience building and shipping successful consumer e-commerce or direct-to-consumer products and features
• A track record of setting product strategy for a team or surface area, and accountability for the outcome it produced
• Experience leading initiatives that span multiple teams and functions, including the dependency and stakeholder work that comes with them
• Direct experience owning discovery surfaces: search, browse, navigation, category, or product detail pages
• Experience building or materially improving an experimentation program, including test design, correct result interpretation, and diagnosis of measurement and data quality problems
• Superb analytical skills and fluency with the tools used to investigate customer behavior
• Demonstrated understanding of technology and architecture, and effective partnership with engineering to identify technical solutions based on tradeoffs across user experience, technical debt, latency, scalability, reliability, and time to market
• Experience mentoring or developing other product managers
• Working fluency with AI tools in your daily product practice
• Project management skills: ability to plan, set expectations, make and meet commitments, and provide structure and process to cross-functional teams
• Intense commitment to the quality of the product and customer experience
• MBA or Master's degree in a relevant field
• Experience with a product information management platform, structured product taxonomy, or attribute-driven merchandising
• Experience with a hosted search and discovery platform
• Technical SEO or answer engine optimization experience
• Experience with personalization or recommendation systems
• Experience in a two-sided marketplace
• Experience through a platform replatforming or migration of comparable scope

Skills

Required

• Product management
• Product strategy
• Experimentation program
• Analytical skills
• Technical understanding
• Mentoring
• AI tools fluency
• Project management
• Quality commitment

Preferred

• Product information management platform
• Structured product taxonomy
• Attribute-driven merchandising
• Hosted search and discovery platform
• Technical SEO
• Answer engine optimization
• Two-sided marketplace
• Platform replatforming or migration

Benefits

• Benefits will be effective on the first of each month following your initial hire date.
• - Medical, Dental, and Vision Benefits
• - Employer-Funded Health Savings Account
• - 10 Paid Holidays
• - Paid Time Off and Sick Leave
• - Paid Parental Leave
• - Monthly Gym/Wellness Reimbursement
• - 401(k) retirement savings plan
• - Employer-Funded Commuter Benefits
• - Employee Discount
• - Friends and Family Discount
• The compensation range for the role applies to employment offers from Minted. Our employment offers fall between the minimum and midpoint of the range to allow for continued salary growth during your employment at Minted. The upper half of the range accommodates this growth and supports our intention to create an environment that encourages lasting relationships between Minted and our employees.
• Minted utilizes a market-based compensation model with four geographic tiers. Final compensation is determined based on the candidate’s primary work location, defined as their residence within 60 miles of a metropolitan area:
• Geo 0: San Francisco, CA In-Office - $156,400 - $205,275
• Geo 1: New York, NY; Los Angeles, CA & all other California markets - $143,888 - $188,853
• Geo 2: Boston, MA; Washington, DC; Chicago, IL; Seattle, WA; Austin, TX; Atlanta, GA; Portland, OR - $132,940 - $174,484
• Geo 3: All other U.S. metro locations - $121,992 - $160,115
• Salaries will vary based on various factors, including but not limited to professional and academic experience, associated job responsibilities, and/or other business or organizational needs.
• This role is eligible for stock options.