Senior Product Manager

Poker Power•Chicago, IL

44d•$112,000 - $140,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Poker Power is seeking a Senior Product Manager to own product strategy for both their web and app surfaces. This role involves defining the roadmap, requirements, analytics, research, and measuring results. The Senior Product Manager will be the sole product strategist, working directly with the founder and partnering with a Product Owner for sprint execution. The position offers significant autonomy and executive access due to the small team size. The role requires defining the purpose of the app and web platforms, managing a quarterly plan and backlog, and ensuring weekly feature releases. Responsibilities include writing detailed specifications, setting success metrics, managing release readiness, and tracking delivery commitments. The role also involves owning app analytics, defining retention measurement standards, and partnering with an analytics resource. A key aspect is conducting user research through interviews, surveys, and usability sessions to understand user behavior and identify drivers of retention and churn. App Store Optimization (ASO) is also a core responsibility, including keyword strategy, listing optimization, and testing store changes. The role requires a strong focus on experimentation, proper hypothesis testing, and honest performance reads. Collaboration across the business, including presenting to the founder and CEO, and acting as an intake point for product requests from other departments, is essential. The Senior Product Manager will also partner with marketing on the user acquisition to first-run experience handoff and brief the design team on requirements.

Requirements

7-10 years in consumer product management.
Substantial mobile experience across iOS and Android.
Startup background, seed through Series C.
Experience working on a small product team with no dedicated research function, analyst, or program management layer.
Experience owning a retention, activation, or engagement number at a consumer product.
Proven ability to ship meaningful work weekly and maintain analysis and delivery speed.
Deep understanding of mobile retention measurement, including install cohorts vs. blended aggregates, segmentation by acquisition source, holding a baseline, and understanding readable change sizes.
Hands-on qualitative research experience, including designing and running user and churn interviews.
Strong specification craft, enabling engineering to build without guessing.
Working knowledge of poker, sufficient to reason about game mechanics and judge feature effectiveness for learners.

Responsibilities

Own roadmap and strategy, including what gets built, in what order, on which surface, and why.
Define the purpose of the app and web platforms and their target audiences.
Maintain a quarterly plan and near-term backlog, weighing competing requests and sequencing work for weekly meaningful shipments.
Write detailed specifications, including user stories, acceptance criteria, edge cases, states, and dependencies.
Set success metrics and kill conditions before development begins.
Work daily with the Product Owner on backlog mechanics and ceremonies.
Participate in planning and refinement, make real-time scope calls, and unblock engineering.
Own release readiness, including instrumentation, QA criteria, rollout, and rollback.
Track delivery commitments and report against them.
Own app analytics, including instrumentation coverage, event taxonomy, metric definitions, and dashboard integrity.
Partner with the analytics resource to ensure new features are counted correctly within company-wide tracking and goals.
Set the retention measurement standard, including install cohorts, acquisition-source segmentation, and baseline discipline.
Monitor cohort retention, activation, and feature depth, and flag deterioration early.
Baseline before launch and report on actual outcomes.
Design and run qualitative research (interviews, surveys, usability sessions) to understand user behavior.
Build a behavioral segmentation of users who succeed versus those who churn.
Find and validate the activation moment that predicts retention.
Monitor store reviews, support themes, and in-product feedback as ongoing signals.
Keep an eye on category benchmarks.
Own App Store Optimization (ASO) as a discipline, including keyword and category strategy, listing copy, screenshots, and store-to-install conversion.
Test store changes and measure their impact.
Own ratings and reviews, including app rating prompts and review response strategies.
Tie install source to downstream retention to judge store performance by user quality.
Run experiments properly, including hypothesis, test design, holdouts, honest reads, and killing ineffective tests.
Stage builds to allow for early results to justify further investment.
Present cohort performance, research, and roadmap reasoning directly to the founder and CEO.
Act as the intake point for product requests from marketing, instructor operations, and other departments.
Partner with marketing on the handoff between acquisition and the first-run experience.
Brief the design team on requirements.