Product Manager - Payments

About Substack

Substack helps independent writers, artists, podcasters, videographers and other creators build sustainable businesses through direct relationships with their audiences. We are building products that give creators more freedom, ownership and ways to earn from their work.

The Role

We're looking for a Product Manager to help expand monetization on Substack.

You'll build better ways for readers to support creators and make the experience of paying for great work simpler and more rewarding. Your scope will include gifting, retention offers and improvements to the payment and subscription experience, with opportunities to explore commerce and, over time, advertising-related monetization.

You'll work closely with Payments Engineering, Design, Data, Growth and Creator Product, as well as Chris Chen and the C-level leadership team. You'll develop a clear, data-informed point of view on what to build and advocate for it with conviction, while staying open to evidence and feedback. You'll get close to creators and readers and move comfortably between product strategy and the details of a checkout flow, an offer, an AI-built prototype or an experiment readout.

This is an individual contributor role. We are considering candidates who can independently lead a focused feature area as well as those ready to own a broader product area end to end, with scope calibrated to demonstrated experience and impact.

What you'll do

• Identify the most valuable opportunities to improve creator earnings and build a focused roadmap with clear goals and trade-offs.

• Develop gifting experiences that help readers support creators, share value with others and strengthen paid communities.

• Improve retention, renewal and win-back experiences, partnering with Growth on offers and subscription lifecycle improvements.

• Make payment journeys clearer and more effective across web and mobile, from plan selection and checkout through successful payment and renewal.

• Explore new monetization pathways, including commerce, and help shape future opportunities in ads as the business evolves.

• Use customer research, direct data analysis and rapid AI-powered prototyping to explore solutions and validate ideas before committing engineering time.

• Partner with engineering and design to make timely decisions, cut scope to learn sooner and maintain a high bar for product quality.

• Define success metrics, run experiments, read results honestly and follow through after launch.

• Translate recurring creator needs and support issues into reusable product capabilities; communicate launches clearly with cross-functional partners.

What we're looking for

• A record of shipping products that improve meaningful customer or business outcomes, with a clear account of your contribution.

• Strategic thinking and strong product judgment: you can use data and customer insight to form an independent point of view, make clear trade-offs and advocate strongly for your recommendations, including with senior leaders, while changing course when evidence calls for it.

• Deep curiosity about how creators earn a living and how readers decide what to pay for.

• Analytical strength, including funnel and cohort analysis, experimentation and the ability to investigate questions directly.

• An AI-native approach to product development: you use AI tools and agents as part of your everyday workflow and can rapidly build working prototypes to test ideas and answer questions yourself.

• Strong design taste and product craft: you can recognize and help shape intuitive, polished experiences, with attention to the details that make financial products understandable and trustworthy. You may have developed this judgment at a company known for excellent design or demonstrated it through products you've built.

• Clear writing and the ability to align engineering, design, data and business partners around decisions.

• Comfort with ambiguity and limited resour...