Product Manager - Payments

Substack•San Francisco, CA

1d•$210,000 - $230,000

About The Position

Substack is seeking a Product Manager to expand monetization and improve how readers support creators. The role covers gifting, retention offers, payment and subscription experiences, and potential future opportunities in commerce and advertising-related monetization. The Product Manager will work with Payments Engineering, Design, Data, Growth, Creator Product, Chris Chen, and C-level leadership. This is an individual contributor role; the scope may focus on a feature area or encompass a broader product area end to end, calibrated to experience and impact. The role combines product strategy with detailed execution. The Product Manager will develop a data-informed point of view, get close to creators and readers, build prototypes, validate ideas, collaborate across teams, and define and assess product outcomes. Substack describes the opportunity as improving a core economic relationship between creators and their audiences while helping creators build durable businesses.

Requirements

A record of shipping products that improve meaningful customer or business outcomes, with a clear account of individual contribution.
Strategic thinking and strong product judgment, including using data and customer insight to form an independent point of view, make trade-offs, advocate for recommendations with senior leaders, and change course when evidence calls for it.
Deep curiosity about how creators earn a living and how readers decide what to pay for.
Analytical strength, including funnel and cohort analysis, experimentation, and the ability to investigate questions directly.
An AI-native product-development approach, using AI tools and agents in everyday work and rapidly building working prototypes to test ideas and answer questions.
Strong design taste and product craft, including the ability to recognize and shape intuitive, polished experiences and attend to details that make financial products understandable and trustworthy.
Clear writing and the ability to align engineering, design, data, and business partners around decisions.
Comfort with ambiguity and limited resources, and willingness to do detailed work to ship and learn.

Nice To Haves

Experience in payments, subscriptions, growth, commerce, marketplaces, or creator products.
Familiarity with payment providers and mobile purchase ecosystems.
Product judgment developed at a company known for excellent design or demonstrated through products built.

Responsibilities

Identify valuable opportunities to improve creator earnings and build a focused roadmap with clear goals and trade-offs.
Develop gifting experiences that help readers support creators, share value, and strengthen paid communities.
Improve retention, renewal, and win-back experiences in partnership with Growth, including offers and subscription lifecycle improvements.
Improve payment journeys across web and mobile, from plan selection and checkout through successful payment and renewal.
Explore monetization pathways such as commerce and help shape future advertising-related opportunities as the business evolves.
Use customer research, direct data analysis, and rapid AI-powered prototyping to explore solutions and validate ideas before committing engineering time.
Partner with engineering and design to make timely decisions, reduce scope to learn sooner, and maintain product quality.
Define success metrics, run experiments, assess results honestly, and follow through after launches.
Translate recurring creator needs and support issues into reusable product capabilities.
Communicate launches clearly with cross-functional partners.