Director of Product Management

About Pocket FM

At our core, we are an AI-powered entertainment company with a human-first philosophy: technology should amplify creativity, not replace it. Our proprietary AI systems work alongside writers, voice artists, and creative teams to help stories scale globally faster, smarter, and with cultural and emotional integrity intact.

We move with a startup mindset, curious, fast, and deeply owner-driven even as we operate at massive scale.

About the role

This is one of the highest-impact product roles here. You will own the full stack of user intelligence from how a first-time listener discovers their first story to how our most loyal users are kept deeply engaged, surprised, and retained. You will define what personalization means at Pocket FM: not just algorithmic ranking, but the entire philosophy of how we understand user intent, surface relevant content, build habit-forming experiences, and grow a platform that millions return to daily.

This is not a caretaker role. We are early in the personalization and discovery journey, and the person in this seat will shape the charter, build the team, and write the playbook.

What you'll own

Recommendations & Personalization

• Own the end-to-end personalization charter from cold-start to deep cohort modeling
• Partner with data science and ML to define ranking signals, behavioral features, and contextual triggers
• Build frameworks to measure and optimize content consumption depth, session frequency, and discovery quality
• Lead the evolution from collaborative filtering to real-time, context-aware recommendation systems
• Define how AI/ML amplifies personalization across content, notifications, onboarding, and beyond

Search

• Shape Pocket FM's search strategy, semantic search, intent understanding, and query-to-content relevance
• Drive improvements in zero-result rates, search-to-play conversion, and longitudinal search behavior
• Collaborate with engineering to evaluate and deploy LLM-assisted search capabilities

User Experience & Retention

• Own the end-to-end user journey, onboarding, first listen, habit formation, and long-term retention
• Identify friction across the funnel through user research, session analytics, and qualitative inputs
• Build a continuous experimentation culture: hypothesis-driven, fast to learn, disciplined about rollout
• Define and track core engagement KPIs: DAU/MAU, session depth, D7/D30 retention, churn cohorts

Product Strategy & Roadmapping

• Build the multi-year vision for how discovery, personalization, and UX compound into a platform moat
• Align roadmap priorities with business goals, content supply, and user insights
• Represent the user and the product in executive forums, communicate strategy with clarity and conviction
• Recruit, mentor, and grow a high-caliber PM team; model what great product thinking looks like

Who we're looking for

• 10–15 years in product management, Deep experience in consumer B2C products at scale, audio, video, gaming, social, or content platforms strongly preferred
• Proven track record of owning and shipping ML-driven personalization or recommendation. Comfortable with ML concepts: collaborative filtering, ranking models, embeddings, bandits, LLM applications in product
• Familiarity with A/B experimentation at scale, you design experiments, read results critically, and build on them
• Can go deep with data scientists on feature engineering and model evaluation, not just a consumer of output
• Experience with experimentation infrastructure: holdouts, CUPED, long-run tracking, novelty effects
• Strong first-principles thinker, you question defaults, pressure-test assumptions, and build from user truth
• High user empathy; you listen deeply, synthesize across qualitative and quantitative signals, and stay close to real behavior
• A taste for simplicity in UX: you know that the best product decisions often feel obvious in hindsight