Product Lead, New Ventures

Nelnet•Remote - Nebraska, NE

4d•$100,000 - $150,000•Hybrid

About The Position

As Product Lead in New Ventures, you take validated business cases and own the full product lifecycle from there: break it into jobs to be done, features, and screens; define and prioritize the MVP; hand off to engineering; iterate based on real user feedback; and continue building and maintaining the roadmap until the venture is mature enough to hand to a GM and dedicated team. You're effectively the de-facto product manager for every new venture until it scales. That means you need to be senior enough to set a product vision and detail-oriented enough to execute it yourself. The other half of this role is structural. As ventures mature, you'll design the product management processes, documentation, and handoff artifacts that make this repeatable—so that when a GM takes over, they inherit a functioning product operation, not just a codebase.

Requirements

5–8 years as a PM, with meaningful time at the 0-to-1 stage—you've taken a problem and turned it into a shipped, iterating product, not just managed a backlog
Senior enough to set a product vision: you can look at a validated problem and articulate a compelling, directional point of view on what the product should become
Detail-oriented enough to execute it: you write specs, run sprints, and make the daily product calls without needing someone above you to translate strategy into work
Demonstrated ability to decompose a high-level problem into jobs to be done, features, user flows, and screen-level specs that engineering can build from
Experience running solution-focused user research—prototype tests, concept walkthroughs, usability sessions—and feeding that signal into the roadmap continuously
Practiced at roadmap prioritization across competing inputs—customer feedback, technical lead times, business constraints—and communicating the logic to stakeholders
Has designed or established product management processes, not just followed them: how specs are written, how work is prioritized, how handoffs are structured
Stakeholder management across functions—engineering, legal, compliance, sales, business unit leaders—without formal authority
Strong written communication: can turn a user session into a product brief and a complex tradeoff into a paragraph a VP will act on
Candidates must already be authorized to work in the United States without the need for current or future sponsorship.

Nice To Haves

Design fluency—can wireframe a flow and make UX calls without waiting for a designer
Experience running sprints and owning the full scrum process as the PM
Experience shipping to B2B buyers where legal, compliance, or procurement is in the critical path

Responsibilities

Take a validated problem statement and break it into customer jobs to be done—what users are actually trying to accomplish and where current solutions fall short
Conduct solution-focused research: prototype tests, concept walkthroughs, and usability sessions that answer what to build, not whether to build
Translate jobs to be done into individual features, user flows, and screen-level detail
Write crisp product briefs that make the tradeoffs explicit and give the team a clear direction to build toward
Define the MVP: the smallest set of features that tests the core value proposition with real users
Prioritize the roadmap against customer feedback, technical lead times, and continuous improvement signal—and communicate the logic clearly to stakeholders
Set a point of view on what's in and what's out at each stage, grounded in evidence
Keep the roadmap current; stakeholders should always know where things stand and why
Write specs engineers want to read: scoped, opinionated, with clear acceptance criteria and explicit tradeoffs
Own the technical handoff—make sure engineering has everything they need to build without coming back for clarification
Run the sprint process: planning, standups, backlog grooming, retrospectives
Close the loop on what shipped: feed user feedback and build learnings back into the next iteration cycle
Decide what's worth iterating, what needs to be rebuilt, and what should be cut—and document the reasoning
Identify who needs to be involved at each stage of the venture and bring them in at the right moment—not too early to slow things down, not too late to course-correct
Communicate product decisions in writing to audiences ranging from engineers to executives
Anchor prioritization conversations in real user signal; make it easy for stakeholders to trust the call even when the answer is no
Represent the product perspective across the organization; build credibility by doing the work, not just presenting it
Own the product roadmap through scale—continue building, iterating, and maintaining the product until a GM and dedicated team are in place
As the de-facto PM for each venture, hold the product vision and make the day-to-day calls that keep the venture moving in the right direction
Design the product management processes, templates, and documentation that make this model repeatable: how specs are written, how roadmaps are maintained, how user feedback is captured and acted on
When a GM is hired, execute a structured handoff—product vision, roadmap, open decisions, user research, and process documentation—so the incoming team inherits a functioning operation
Each venture you hand off should leave Venture Factory's product process stronger than when you started