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

Kovo•Austin, TX

4d•Remote

About The Position

Kovo is hiring a Product Manager to build and run a new consumer financial product vertical for people who are low-income, subprime, or underserved by traditional finance. The role spans selecting the vertical, prototyping candidate ideas with real customers, modeling their economics, designing the product with legal and compliance, building and launching its first version, and scaling the resulting business line. The Product Manager works directly with Kovo’s founders and the person responsible for legal and compliance, and reports to one of the founders, based in Austin, Texas. Before a vertical is selected, the role focuses on prototypes, customer conversations, unit economics, and partner research. After selection, the Product Manager designs a version that achieves the customer outcome with as few licenses and obligations as possible, reuses Kovo’s existing identity, payments, credit reporting, and customer-base capabilities, and launches to a segment of existing customers. After launch, the role owns the vertical’s metrics, north star, roadmap, quarterly plans, integrations, and cross-sell offer with Kovo’s credit builder vertical. This is a high-ownership, high-intensity remote role with limited scaffolding and rapidly evolving priorities. The company emphasizes building directly rather than managing a backlog, writing tickets, or managing engineers’ time. The Product Manager is expected to prototype first, use AI agents heavily while holding their output to a high standard, and pull their own numbers using SQL and product analytics. Kovo notes that its pace is not optimized for work-life balance.

Requirements

Have either founded, co-founded, or been a founding engineer at a company and owned a product end to end, or have worked in private equity, growth equity, credit investing, or strategic finance before taking an early operator role at a fintech and 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 taking full ownership in a high-intensity remote role with little scaffolding and rapidly changing priorities.
Be motivated to build a business and stand up a regulated consumer product.
Be energized by expanding financial access for underserved people.
Prototype before or alongside writing concise explanatory documents.
Communicate clearly and concisely in writing.
Be able to use SQL and product analytics to retrieve and analyze product data.
Use AI agents heavily while applying a high quality bar to their output.

Nice To Haves

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

Responsibilities

Prototype candidate verticals in sandbox environments and test them with real customers.
Model customer acquisition cost payback, loss rates, and margins for candidate verticals.
Research partners and present the founders with a clear recommendation supported by evidence.
Work with legal and compliance to design a product version 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.
Use AI agents in product development and maintain a high standard for their output.
Partner with backend engineering on the ledger, money movement, and other features involving funds; collaborate with design and frontend engineering as needed.
Launch the product to a segment of Kovo’s existing customers.
Own the vertical’s metrics, including conversion, losses, payback, and retention.
Set the vertical’s north star, roadmap, and quarterly plans, and deliver against them.
Own the technical side of partner and vendor integrations.
Design the cross-sell offer between the new vertical and the credit builder vertical.
Build alongside engineers rather than managing their schedules or handing off work that the Product Manager could do directly.