Lead Product Manager

Manifest Global empowers in building companies that connect the world towards growth, prosperity, and innovation. Our portfolio includes trailblazer brands such as Cialfo , BridgeU , Explore , Kaaiser , EduGo , and Flow AI and which are dedicated to expanding global student mobility by serving their respective stakeholders in the ecosystem.

Our Mission
To create a world where every student, regardless of their ethnicity, nationality, socio-economic status, and learning preference, gets equal access to higher education through our world-class network of portfolio brands; a network that globally connects community stakeholders that provide the finest resources and support material, anywhere in the world and at any time.

What This Role Is

Every year, millions of students make a decision that sets the direction of their lives: where to study, what to study, and which country they will build a career in. That decision runs through a counselor's office, a university's admissions funnel, a family's conversation with an advisor, and a visa timeline — and almost none of the signal from one step reaches the next. Manifest exists to connect that journey, and it does it through products that each serve one part of it exceptionally well.

This role owns one of those parts at a time. As a Lead PM, you take full product ownership of a single business unit, accountable for one thing above all: making the user that unit serves successful at what they are trying to do. You go deep on that user — their workflow, their friction, what "success" actually means for them — and you build the product that delivers it.

This is an individual contributor seat. No direct reports. Your leverage comes from how completely you understand one stakeholder, how good the product you build for them becomes, and how well you bring the rest of the business along with you.

You report to the VP of Product. You are assessed on two things: the P&L of the unit you're leading and the product-outcome metrics aligned to it — the measures of whether the user you serve is genuinely more successful. Both move together, and both are how your performance is judged.

You do this inside a larger system. Manifest is several products becoming one connected whole, with a shared intelligence layer running underneath. You don't own that layer or the cross-portfolio strategy — but you understand the portfolio deeply, you know how your unit connects to the others, and you build in a way that draws on the shared layer and feeds signal back into it. Your focus is narrow by design. Your awareness of the whole is not.

How the Role Grows

You own one business unit at a time, not one forever. As the business evolves and as you grow, you may move to a different unit — a different product, a different stakeholder, a different problem — typically on a twelve- to eighteen-month horizon. Moves are deliberate, not arbitrary: they happen when a unit reaches a stable state you've brought it to, and they're a mutual decision between you and the VP of Product, weighing what the business needs against where you want to grow. You won't be pulled off something mid-flight the moment it starts working. It's how Manifest puts its strongest product thinking where the business needs it most, and it's how you build range: the PM who has gone deep on the counselor, then the student, then the advisor understands this ecosystem in a way almost no one else can. The constant across every rotation is the mandate — own one unit completely, make its user successful, build AI-native product that plugs into the whole.

What Makes This Role Different

Most product roles ask you to manage a backlog. This one asks you to own an outcome for a specific user and build whatever it takes to get there — including taking it to market and getting it genuinely adopted, and including the AI-native product that user has never had before.

The leverage is the Manifest ecosystem. You are not building for your user from scratch and in isolation. You have a shared intelligence layer to build on, signal from across the portfolio to draw on, and a company that is AI-native from first principles. That means you can build recommendations, workflows, and agentic experiences for your unit that a standalone product in that space could never see well enough to build.

The timing is the argument. Across Manifest's units, AI is at the point where it stops being a feature and becomes the way the product works. The person who defines that for a given user, now, sets the direction for years.

What's Hard — And Why It's Worth It

The best product people we know are drawn to the hard version of a problem, not the safe one. So here's the honest shape of it.

You go deep on one unit, but you build on a shared layer with its own gravity and other units pulling on it. Getting what your user needs sometimes means making your case against someone else's — and not always winning. That friction isn't noise. It's what forces the sharpest thinking you'll do here, and the PM who learns to fight for their user while strengthening the whole becomes the rarest kind of operator this company has.

The business leader who runs your unit knows their market cold and has their own conviction about the roadmap. Sometimes your data will say they're wrong. The moment you tell them that — in the language of their own business — and come out with their trust intact is the moment you stop being a PM who executes and become one leaders actually follow.

And because PMs rotate, you'll often inherit a unit mid-stride: someone else's half-built roadmap, live commitments, a team already in motion. Deciding what to keep, what to kill, and what to reimagine — without burning the trust that came before you — is how you build the range almost no one in this market has. Do it two or three times and you'll understand this ecosystem in a way that can't be taught, only earned.

None of this is the easy version of a PM job. That's exactly the point.

What You Own

Your business unit and its user

- Own the product roadmap for the business unit you're leading, anchored to a single question: is the user it serves more successful because of what we built?

- Go deep on discovery — with data and directly with users — so that every bet traces to a real, understood problem, not a feature request

- Hold yourself to outcomes, not output: you are measured by whether the user's success metric moved, not by what shipped

Go-to-market and adoption

- Own how what you build actually reaches users — launch, onboarding, and the path from shipped to genuinely used

- Partner with sales, marketing, and the unit's commercial leadership on positioning, pricing input, and the motion that drives adoption

- Tie your roadmap to the unit's commercial outcomes — retention, conversion, revenue — and own your side of hitting them, not just informing them

AI-native product and agentic workflows

- Design the AI-native experience for your unit's user: define what AI should do inside their daily workflow, and where it shouldn't go

- Build agentic workflows that do real work for your users rather than sitting as an add-on feature they open once

- Own the measurement model that tells you honestly whether that AI is changing user behavior, and hold the roadmap to it

Building on the shared intelligence layer

- Build your unit's product on top of Manifest's shared intelligence layer — drawing on cross-portfolio signal rather than rebuilding it

- Feed signal from your unit back into the shared layer so the rest of the portfolio compounds off your work

- Partner with the engineering and data teams who own that layer to get what your unit needs built, and design privacy, consent, and regional data requirements in from the start

Stakeholders across the business

- Earn the trust of the business leader who runs your unit, and your product and engineering peers across the other brands — none of whom report to you, all of whom you need

- Make the call on what your unit builds, explain the reasoning in terms of each stakeholder's own business, and leave those conversations with the relationship stronger

- Understand Manifest's full portfolio and larger vision well enough to know where your unit fits, and flag where a problem you're solving is really a shared one rather than quietly solving it twice

Product craft

- Set the quality bar for how product gets done on your unit: sharp written thinking, prioritization you can defend, and decisions documented clearly enough that anyone — including the PM who inherits the unit after you — can see why they were made

- Raise the craft of the people around you by example, not mandate

What Success Looks Like

The markers below are directional. We'll calibrate the specifics for whichever unit you're leading once you're in the seat.

In your first weeks, you will build the clearest picture anyone has of how your unit's user actually works, where the product serves them well, and where it falls short. You will leave that period with a written point of view the business can test and challenge.

By the middle of your first year, your unit will have a roadmap that is visibly moving the metric that matters for its user, at least one AI-native workflow live and being used in the real work — not demoed, used — and a go-to-market motion behind it that is driving real adoption. You'll know, with data, whether it's working.

Over time, you build products users rely on rather than tolerate — built in a way that makes the whole Manifest system stronger because your unit is plugged into it, not walled off from it. And as you move across units, that track record compounds into a kind of product judgment this ecosystem can't be run without.

What You Bring

You have spent ten to fourteen years in product, with real depth building for a specific user or segment rather than spreading thin across many. You know a stakeholder's workflow is something you earn an understanding of, not something you assume — and you've shipped product that measurably changed an outcome for that user.

You are outcome-oriented to the core. You measure yourself by whether the number that matters moved, not by what you shipped, and when something isn't being used, your instinct is to find out exactly why — with data and with users — before anything lands on a backlog. You think in systems and in P&L, and you own your side of the go-to-market that turns a good product into an adopted one.

You lead without a reporting line. You can win the trust of a business leader who runs their own P&L, tell them their roadmap should change, explain why in terms of their business, and come out with the relationship stronger. You've managed the room where stakeholders disagree and left it aligned.

You are AI-native, or visibly becoming it. You've built AI-powered product into real workflows — or you're moving there fast and with intent — and you know the difference between AI people try once and AI people come to rely on. You're technical enough to design agentic workflows alongside engineers, and grounded enough to know where AI shouldn't go. Most of all, you treat becoming more AI-native as part of the job, not a box you've already ticked.

You hold a high bar for craft: sharp written thinking, defensible prioritization, and decisions documented clearly enough that the person who inherits your unit can see why each call was made. You raise the standard of the people around you by how you work, not by telling them to.

You're comfortable going narrow — owning one user's success completely — while staying fluent in the bigger system your work sits inside, and you're energized rather than unsettled by the prospect of taking that same discipline to a new unit when the business needs it. You can define a problem before anyone defines it for you, and change your mind when the evidence moves. And underneath it: you remember that the user you're building for is helping a student through one of the biggest decisions of their life.

Most importantly, you read this and your first reaction wasn't "this is a solid PM job." It was "I want to own a user completely and build the thing they can't work without." That's the person this role is for.

Why Manifest

Manifest Global is building the infrastructure for global human capital mobility, connecting students, schools, universities, and employers across 150+ countries. Our portfolio spans Cialfo (AI-powered college counseling, 2,000+ schools), BridgeU (university guidance for international schools globally), Kaaiser (trusted study abroad counseling since 1997 across India and Southeast Asia), Explore (AI-powered university outreach, 1,000+ university partners), and EduGo (study abroad counseling and student placement). Together, we move talent across borders at scale. $700B flows annually in remittances from migrant workers. 85M workers will be missing from developed economies by 2030. We're building the operating system that changes that. $76M raised. Still early.

This seat is where that mission gets real for one user at a time. The ecosystem compounds only if each unit serves its stakeholder exceptionally well and plugs into the whole. Yours is the unit — whichever one you're leading — that proves it.