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

Kovo is hiring a Product Manager to identify, prototype, launch, and scale a new consumer financial product vertical. The role partners with founders and legal and compliance, builds the initial product, and owns its business metrics and roadmap.

Responsibilities:

• Prototype candidate verticals in our sandbox environments and test them with real customers
• Model CAC payback, loss rates and margin for each candidate
• Bring the founders a clear recommendation and the evidence behind it
• Work with legal and compliance on the version that delivers the customer outcome with the fewest licenses and obligations
• Reuse what Kovo already has wherever you can: identity, payments, credit reporting and our customer base
• Ship the first version yourself: customer flows, integrations, events and experiments. Use agents heavily
• Partner with backend engineering on the ledger, money movement and anything else that touches funds
• Bring in design for polish and frontend engineering for implementation
• Own the vertical's metrics: conversion, losses, payback and retention
• Own the technical side of partner and vendor integrations
• Design the cross-sell offer between this vertical and the credit builder vertical

Requirements:

• You've founded a company, or were one of its first engineers, and you built the product yourself. Or you started in private equity or investing, then joined a fintech early and built a business line
• Your first prototype is working code, not a deck
• You understand finance deeply, and you treat unit economics as part of product design, not a finance review at the end
• You'd rather design a product that needs fewer licenses than staff up to manage more of them
• You want to run a business line, not manage a backlog
• You want to build a business. The idea of standing up a regulated consumer product yourself is why you'd take this job
• Energized by expanding financial access for millions of underserved people
• Comfortable in a high-intensity, remote role with full ownership and little scaffolding
• You hate AI slop. You use agents heavily and hold their output to a higher bar than your own
• Prototype first, before or alongside writing the one page that explains it
• Clear, short writer. People act on your message after one read
• You pull your own numbers in SQL and product analytics
• One of these two paths: (1) Founder, co-founder, or founding engineer who owned a product end to end. (2) Private equity, growth equity, credit investing or strategic finance, then an early operator role at a fintech where you built a business line
• You've taken a consumer product from zero to one
• Consumer fintech experience in lending, payments, cash advance, banking, cards, or similar
• You've worked inside a bank or lending partnership program
• Bonus: You've shipped production code recently, in TypeScript, React, or similar. AI-assisted counts