Founding Product Manager
Own HeyHomie’s product, metrics and shipping rhythm — and grow into Head of Product.
Location
Bangalore (in-office)
Work model
On-site
Type
Full-time (IC)
Experience
3–7 years
Compensation
Senior IC + ESOPs
Reports to
Founder & CEO
Trajectory
Head of Product in 18–24 months
Product-market fit on referrals doesn’t survive without product rigour underneath.
HeyHomie earned its product-market fit the hard way — no performance marketing, no paid acquisition. Every seller who joins comes because another seller told them to. That is the rarest signal a young company can buy.
But our sellers run across 22+ categories. Their needs diverge. Their workflows diverge. Their metrics diverge. Right now we hold the shape together with founder instinct, customer-success effort and engineering willpower. That works to a point. We are at the point.
What the next chapter needs is a brain that holds the product together — someone who reads users and dashboards with equal rigour, who decides what we build, what we kill, what we polish and what we delay, and who’ll do it themselves on a Tuesday afternoon and write the spec on Wednesday morning.
“This is not a “manage the engineering backlog” role. This is the role that owns whether HeyHomie’s product compounds or stalls.”
You are HeyHomie’s founding product manager. You own the product, the metrics, and the rhythm of how we ship.
You report directly to the founder. You do not have a PM team to back you up — you have engineering, design, customer success, and a founder who will spar with you on every decision. That is the design.
You write the specs. You talk to the sellers. You read the data. You sit in the support escalations and the engineering standups. You QA before launch. You write the in-app copy, the launch note — and then you measure what happened.
If a part of the product is broken, it is yours. If onboarding does not activate, it is yours. If the support tickets keep repeating the same complaint, it is yours. If a dashboard tells a story no one is acting on, it is yours.
The trajectory is Head of Product within 18 to 24 months. You earn it by what shipped, what worked, and what the metrics actually did — not by what you presented in a slide.
If a seller touches it, it is yours.
The roadmap
You decide what gets built, what gets killed, what gets pushed. You hold the line on prioritisation when the team wants to do everything, and on shipping when the team wants to polish forever. You are the tiebreaker the founder relies on — not the messenger between the founder and the team.
User research
You talk to homepreneurs every week, across categories and stages. You know the cake seller from Mumbai, the saree reseller from Surat, the bakery owner from Pune by their actual problems — not their personas. You bring those conversations into the room. You do not delegate this. Not now, not ever.
The metrics layer
Activation, retention, time-to-first-value, NRR, churn, expansion revenue, feature adoption, ticket trends, funnel drop-offs, cohort behaviour. You own the dashboards, the reading, and the calls that come out of them. You build the dashboards if they do not exist.
The full lifecycle, not just the build
Onboarding flows. Activation moments. Support experience. Customer-success enablement. Renewal and upsell triggers. Win-back flows. If a product surface touches a seller, it is in your scope.
The specs and the polish
You write the PRDs and wireframe when needed. You QA before launch. You write the in-app copy, the empty states, the error messages and the launch note. You do not hand off and walk away.
The cross-functional glue
Engineering needs clarity on scope. Design needs clarity on intent. Customer success needs to know what ships and when. Sales needs talking points. Marketing needs positioning. You are the connective tissue across all of it.
The team’s metric, not just yours
You do not optimise your number at the cost of someone else’s. If engineering is burning out on bugs, that is your problem too. If customer success is repeating the same answer fifty times a week, that is your problem too. The system wins or the system loses. You own the system.
Too senior for a week-in-the-life. Here’s your first quarter.
We’re not writing a week-in-the-life — the role is too senior and the work too cyclical. Here is what your first 90 days actually look like.
Weeks 1–4 · Listen & read
You talk to twenty sellers across categories. You sit in support shadows for a week. You read every dashboard and sit with engineering, customer success and the founder. By the end of week four you have a written audit: what is working, what is broken, what is invisible, what we are about to need. Not a slide deck. A document.
Weeks 5–8 · Ship one thing that moves a metric
Not a roadmap presentation. Not a vision document. One product change, shipped to real sellers, measured against a real number — a fix to onboarding activation, a rework of the support experience, a new analytics surface for sellers. You decide what wins fastest, ship it, and defend the choice in front of the team.
Weeks 9–12 · Set the rhythm
By quarter’s end you have set the product rhythm: how we plan, how we ship, how we measure, how we kill features, how we listen to sellers. The team feels the difference. The founder feels the difference. The sellers feel the difference. That is the bar.
An operator, not a strategist.
- An operator, not a strategist. You have shipped products and can point to specific features, metrics and decisions you owned end-to-end and watched go live. Not “I worked on” or “I was responsible for.”
- Equal rigour on users and on data. You walk out of a one-hour seller interview with three insights, and you open a dashboard and say what is actually happening — not what the founder wants to believe. Suspicious of vanity metrics and of pure qualitative gut alike.
- Hands-on by default. You write the PRD, wireframe the screen, QA the build, write the in-app text, write the support FAQ when CS needs it. No PM team does this for you — and you find that energising, not exhausting.
- Thinks in lifecycles, not features. The product starts at the first message a seller reads about HeyHomie and ends when they renew, refer or churn. You own the whole arc.
- Holds the team’s metric, not just yours. You catch when CS is drowning because of a product gap, or engineering is burning out on a backlog with no edits. You see the system, not your slice. This is the trait we are most stubborn about.
- Pushes back on engineering, defers when right. Not the loudest voice and not the most polite — the most honest one. You bring data, user voice and opinion, and you change your mind when the better argument shows up.
- Founder instinct, not founder ego. You make the call when it is yours and ask for help when it is not. You can look at any product surface and tell within five minutes what is generic and what is opinionated — and defend it, or kill your darlings when the data argues back.
If you can also run product marketing, we’ll give you the room to.
Positioning, launch campaigns, narrative, sales enablement, content — these are real gaps at HeyHomie today, and we will not pretend they are not.
We are not making PMM a requirement, because the moment we do, we lose the senior PM applicants we want. But if you have the range to lead both, you will get the room to lead both — the trajectory becomes broader and the impact compounds twice as fast.
If this is you, mention it explicitly in your application. We will design the role around what you bring.
Not a “maybe one day” promise. The structural design of the role.
Months 0–6 · The Founding PM
You ship. You listen. You set the rhythm. You build trust with the team, the sellers and the founder.
Months 6–12 · The Product Owner
The roadmap is yours. The metrics are yours. The team trusts you with the calls. You start defining the next product hires we need.
Months 12–24 · Head of Product
You hire around you. You set the function. You have a seat in the room where the company gets shaped.
The path is owned by you. The faster you ship, the faster you lead.
What this role pays you that a bigger company can’t.
We pay competitively for the senior IC bracket, with meaningful ESOPs — discussed openly at offer stage, with no games. But if compensation is the first and loudest question, larger companies will outbid us. They have to; they have less to offer otherwise. Here is what they can’t match:
The compounding capital of being early
Founding PM at a Meta Technology Partner that already has product-market fit. That is a story you tell for the next ten years.
Direct founder access, every day
Every roadmap call, every product call, every business call — you are in the room. You do not need a meeting to influence the direction of the company.
A product that already has users
Sellers across 22+ categories. Live transactions. Real conversations. You build for a market that exists, not one you have to manufacture.
The path to Head of Product, by design
Not by chance, not by politics. By what you ship. You are writing the thesis, the roadmap and the team — not implementing someone else’s.
“If you read all of that and the loudest thing in your head is still the cash number, this is not the role. We will not be hurt if you decide that. We will be hurt if you join and decide it after.”
You should apply if
- You have shipped products to real users, owned the metric, and can talk about it without a deck.
- You read product surfaces, dashboards and user interviews with the same instinct.
- You already have an opinion on the WhatsApp and Instagram commerce problem space — before reading this JD.
- You want a founding seat and the trajectory that comes with it, and you are willing to earn both.
- You want to be in the room where the product gets decided, not the room where someone else’s decisions get scoped into tickets.
- You believe great product comes from doing the work, not delegating it.
Do not apply if
- You think a PM is a project manager, and your output is specs.
- You delegate user research, QA and the boring parts. You prefer to call the shots without getting your hands dirty.
- Your CV reads like a list of features you were “involved in,” not outcomes that shipped because of you.
- You need a team of three to make a single product decision.
- You optimise your number at the cost of someone else’s. You do not see the system.
- You want to optimise the next 18 months for cash. Optimise for compounding learning here, for cash elsewhere — both are valid, only one fits this role.
- You believe “founding PM” is a title rather than a way of operating.
How to apply
We read every application.
- 01Hit “Apply for this role” and complete the form. Include your CV.
- 02Add links to two products you have shipped that you are most proud of — public links, write-ups, talks. Anything that shows the work and the thinking.
- 03Write a 300-word note to the prompt: sign up for HeyHomie as a seller, spend thirty minutes inside the product, then tell us the top three things you would change, the metric you would hold yourself to for each, and the one thing you would defend with your life. Tell us how you think, not what you already know.
- 04The 300-word note is the most important part — we read it before the CV. Treat it accordingly.
This is the role that owns whether HeyHomie’s product compounds or stalls.
