Product Manager - New Vertical (ex-founder or ex-private equity)

Kovo•Austin, TX

6d•$180,000 - $270,000•Remote

About The Position

Kovo is hiring a Product Manager to create and lead a new consumer financial product vertical for people who are low-income, subprime, or underserved by traditional finance. Working directly with the founders and the person responsible for legal and compliance, the Product Manager will help evaluate potential verticals, build prototypes, recommend which opportunity to pursue, and then build, launch, and scale the selected business line. Before a vertical is selected, the role focuses on prototyping candidate products in sandbox environments, speaking with customers, researching partners, and modeling unit economics such as customer acquisition cost payback, loss rates, and margin. After selection, the Product Manager will work with legal and compliance to design a product that achieves the customer outcome with as few licenses and obligations as possible, reuse Kovo's existing capabilities, and build and launch an initial version to a segment of existing customers. The role owns the vertical's metrics, technical partner and vendor integrations, cross-sell strategy with Kovo's credit builder vertical, north star, roadmap, and quarterly plans. The Product Manager is expected to build alongside engineering, use agents heavily, and personally ship the first version rather than delegate product development or manage a backlog. The role reports to one of Kovo's founders and is described as high-intensity, remote, and high-ownership, with limited scaffolding and rapidly evolving priorities.

Requirements

Have founded, co-founded, or been a founding engineer at a company and owned a product end to end; or have experience in private equity, growth equity, credit investing, or strategic finance followed by an early operator role at a fintech building a business line.
Have taken a consumer product from zero to one.
Have consumer fintech experience in lending, payments, cash advance, banking, cards, or a similar area.
Have worked inside a bank or a lending partnership program.
Be comfortable with a high-intensity, remote role involving full ownership and little scaffolding.
Use product analytics and SQL to retrieve and work with numbers independently.
Write clear, concise communications that people can act on after one read.
Prototype before or alongside writing a concise explanation of the concept.
Use AI agents heavily and hold their output to a high standard.
Be motivated to build a regulated consumer product and expand financial access for underserved people.

Nice To Haves

Recent production code shipping experience in TypeScript, React, or similar; AI-assisted development counts.

Responsibilities

Prototype candidate verticals in sandbox environments and test them with real customers.
Model customer acquisition cost payback, loss rates, and margin for each candidate vertical.
Present the founders with a clear recommendation and supporting evidence.
Work with legal and compliance to design a product that delivers the customer outcome with the fewest licenses and obligations.
Reuse Kovo's existing identity, payments, credit reporting, and customer-base capabilities where possible.
Build and ship the first version, including customer flows, integrations, events, and experiments, using agents heavily.
Partner with backend engineering on the ledger, money movement, and other systems involving funds.
Work with design on polish and frontend engineering on implementation.
Own the vertical's conversion, losses, payback, and retention metrics.
Own the technical side of partner and vendor integrations.
Design the cross-sell offer between the new vertical and Kovo's credit builder vertical.
Set the vertical's north star, roadmap, and quarterly plans, and deliver against them.