You came up through design or research, and you own the product decisions behind every screen a shopper has to trust: what a verdict must do, for whom, and how we know it worked.

Product.ai (product.ai) is the verified truth layer for shopping: when a person or an AI agent needs to know what's actually true about a purchase, we answer with proof. SimplyCodes (simplycodes.com) is the first proof at scale, the code verification service, at about $22M a year in revenue. Profitable. Founder-owned since 2009, bootstrapped, no outside investors, no board. Fewer than twenty operators.

Why This Role Exists

We have one product-leader seat open, and we're running it as several doors so the level and the craft of the hire follow the person, not the job title. This door is for the design-led path: a product manager whose craft came up through product design or user research, who thinks in experiences before features, and who can hold the consumer quality bar for a product whose whole promise is trust.

The question the seat exists to answer is which Product.ai surface earns the company's next dollar: conversational answers, the Truth Graph pages that carry them into search, or personalization. You gather the evidence, make the case, and own the answer end to end. One constraint is settled and you inherit it: Truth Graph pages are search-first. A verified answer wins by being found.

A spec here is not a document that drifts. A locked spec is the roadmap of record; agents build directly from it, and separate verifier agents grade the build against it. Our Founding Designer owns the design system and the design law it enforces. You own what the design serves: the decision the shopper is making, what the verdict has to do for them, and the evidence that says it did. You work directly with the founder.

The System You'll Need to Model

  • Trust-calibrated consumer products. General assistants average the internet confidently. Ours answers with verified truth and citations, including "don't buy this." The bar is whether a person trusts the verdict on a high-stakes purchase, and engagement metrics don't measure that. Communicating calibrated confidence, when we're sure and when we're not, is decision-support design at its hardest.
  • Decision-shaped interfaces. The core unit is a verdict: what's true, the evidence, the confidence, and the honest "wait" or "walk away." The user reshapes the question, a budget, a constraint, a skin type, and watches the verdict change. Every product decision is a decision about how that interaction earns trust.
  • Knowledge-graph products. One trustworthy answer combines what exists and what it costs, which claims survive verification with citations intact, and what this particular shopper cares about. You decide how those layers meet the person.
  • Spec-driven agentic development. Intent becomes a visual mockup, then a locked spec, then agents build, then verifier agents grade the build against the spec. The verifier is the crux: a test the building agent can't author or grade. Your spec is the interface the whole loop builds and grades against, and your taste gates what ships.
  • Exploration at machine scale. You'll direct agents to render dozens of real, working directions where a traditional process produces three, then decide which ones earn a shopper's time. Compute is cheap; the expensive thing is shipping the wrong direction confidently.
  • Cortex, the shared AI brain the company runs on. You'll work inside it daily, directing coding agents the way our founder does, and since August any operator here can change the rules the company runs on, live, without waiting on him.

If reading that energizes you, keep going. If it feels overwhelming or underspecified, this isn't the right fit.

What You Will Own

  • The consumer quality bar. The standard for everything a shopper touches, written as evidence tests for four to six product outcomes, each falsifiable, each with a test a stranger could run. When the bar and the schedule conflict, you hold the bar.
  • Product law for your surfaces. The locked specs agents build from across conversational answers, the Truth Graph pages that carry them into search, and personalization. Agents write the code; you write the spec, the acceptance tests and the verdict on what ships.
  • The decision-shaped experience standard. With our Founding Designer, you define what a verdict looks like when the evidence is mixed, when to say "wait," and how confidence reads without overselling or burying it. The design law is theirs; the product decision it serves is yours.
  • Evidence into rulings. Our Founding Designer runs the sessions that put real directions in front of real shoppers. You own what happens next: the ruling, the spec change, and the evidence test that says the change worked, so a design choice settles on what shoppers did, not on the loudest opinion in the room, yours included.
  • Your seat charter. Within your first quarter you co-sign a charter for this seat. It names one machine-checkable number that proves the seat is working, and a written split of what you decide freely versus what you bring to the founder.

The craft you must already own: consumer product judgment, user research you have run yourself, and writing a spec precise enough that someone, or something, built the right thing from it. Comparable experience we accept: product design leads who moved into product management, PMs who came up through research, or product managers on consumer, marketplace, search or conversational products where the experience was the product. What you'll grow into here: directing agent fleets as a production system, evaluation design as a first-class product skill, and knowledge-graph product architecture.

Who You Are

How you think. You start from the person and the decision they're making, and you form your own working model of the system behind the screen, then notice where it's wrong and update fast, killing your own ideas when the evidence says so. You write clearly, because clear writing is evidence of clear thought, and here your writing is executable.

How you work. You move between strategy and a locked spec without getting stuck at either altitude, from "what should the answer do when the evidence conflicts?" to a spec agents can build from, same day. You treat agents as leverage and you verify what comes back. You can do this job by hand and prove it: draw the flow, write the spec, read the study, make the call.

What you've probably built. Consumer products people use, live surfaces instead of strategy decks, with the research behind the decisions and the specs that shipped without a meeting. Maybe you led product design somewhere and found yourself owning the roadmap; maybe you ran research and started writing the specs. We care about the artifact and the reasoning more than where you did it.

Who this isn't for. This is wrong if your product practice is roadmap theater: decks, alignment meetings and planning rituals that never touch the build. It's wrong if you need an engineering team to hand you velocity, or a design team beneath you to feel senior; there's no team to manage, and your judgment in writing is what ships. It's wrong if you'd rather be admired for the vision than accountable for what shipped, or if you're comfortable shipping what an agent produced without being able to say why it's right. It's wrong if this is an 18-month stop; the seat charter is a multi-year bet in both directions. You'll be happiest here if you want to own the whole loop yourself and be measured on whether people trust what you shipped.

How We Evaluate

We don't run traditional product-manager interviews.

  1. Async video screen. About 15 minutes, on your own time. It replaces the recruiter screen.
  2. Calls with company stakeholders. Short conversations with the team.
  3. Conversation with the founder. How you model the systems above, where you push back, and whether you can hold the product bar in a live argument.
  4. Paid work trial. A paid 10-14 day trial, real work in our real environment, taking a live consumer problem from intent to locked spec to verified build. We watch how you get grounded, whether you write the spec before the build, how you verify what your agents produce, and whether your self-assessment is honest.

If the work above reads like yours but your resume is unconventional, apply anyway. We hire on the work and the reasoning, not the pedigree.

Compensation & Ownership

Total first-year comp: $300,000 to $425,000 (base + performance-based ownership and profit-share programs). Base: $200,000 to $260,000.

Beyond base: eligibility for the company's ownership and profit-share programs, grants are performance-based, terms discussed at the offer stage; 100% family premium coverage; and an effectively unlimited token budget, steered by return, never capped.

Based in Santa Monica, Los Angeles, in person, five days a week. Relocation support available for the right builder.