Product Manager

Liminal; Boston (MA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Liminal, a Founders' Studio in Boston, is seeking a product manager to chart direction in a zero-to-one environment. You will work with founders, engineers, and designers to uncover real user needs, shape a product vision, and outline an MVP with a clear bets timeline.

You thrive on ambiguity, translate insights into tests, and guide a ruthless prioritization process. You’ll balance user needs, technical feasibility, and business viability to deliver meaningful progress from day one.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in product management
• Experience shaping early-stage products
• Strong judgment and hypothesis testing

Responsibilities

• Find the problem before the solution through user research
• Define product vision, MVP, and bets with clear sequence
• Keep team focused on the core problem
• Design experiments and refine ideas based on results
• Translate choices into deliverable roadmaps

Skills

Product management

User research

Roadmapping

Prioritization

Job description

What Liminal is

A Founders' Studio. We co-build with repeat founders, many of them unicorn founders, providing build expertise, capital, and unfair access from founding to Series B. We call ourselves a Founders' Studio because "venture studio" undersells what we do and oversells what most of them deliver.

What This Role Actually Is

At zero-to-one, there is no mature product to manage. No five-year roadmap to inherit. No dashboard telling you what users did last quarter.

There is usually a founder with a conviction, technology with possibilities, a market full of assumptions, and a finite amount of time and money to figure out what deserves to exist. You are the product champion inside that mess.

You need to be fluent in three languages simultaneously: what users actually need versus what they say they need, what's technically feasible versus what the pitch deck promises, and what the business can sustain versus what the founder dreams about at 2 am. Most PMs are passable in one, conversational in two, and fraudulent in the third. We want all three.

The Work

• Find the problem before falling in love with the solution. Talk to users. Study customers. Tear apart the market. Use human-centered research to figure out what people actually need, not just what they say they want.
• Decide what gets built. Turn messy inputs into a product vision, MVP, and clear sequence of bets. Prioritize ruthlessly. Every feature has a cost, including the good ones.
• Keep the team problem-centric. Engineers, designers, founders, and customers will all have solutions. Your job is to keep dragging the conversation back to the problem we're actually trying to solve.
• Run the evidence loop. Define the hypotheses that matter, design experiments to test them, and use what comes back to refine, pivot, or abandon the idea. Report what happened, not what everyone hoped would happen.
• Build roadmaps that mean something. Work with project management, technology, and engineering to translate product choices into something that can actually be delivered. A roadmap is a set of trade-offs, not a wishlist with dates attached.
• Prove there's a business underneath the product. Product-market fit without commercial viability isn't much of a victory. You'll connect the product roadmap to the business model, customer value proposition, and larger venture strategy.

Who You Are

• You’ve earned your product instincts. 5+ years in product management has given you more than frameworks: judgment, pattern recognition, and a healthy suspicion of confident assumptions.
• Zero-to-one is your natural habitat. You've worked on products before the answers were obvious: discovering, conceptualizing, launching, pivoting, or scaling something from the ground up. A blank page is more interesting to you than a perfectly groomed backlog.
• Comfortable in the mess. Priorities change. New evidence breaks old assumptions. Timelines move. You can create structure without needing structure handed to you first.
• Contrarian streak. Independent thinker. Arguments from first principles. Unafraid of unpopular positions, including saying the prototype failed when everyone in the room wants it to have worked. You believe the best products survive open debate. You know how to disagree and commit.
• You learn unnervingly fast. Our ventures move across industries and technologies. You'll need to get smart enough, quickly enough, to ask the questions that matter.

Unicorn Points If

You’ve done this from both sides of the table: built zero-to-one products as a PM and founded something yourself. You’ve personally lived through finding the problem, shipping the wrong thing, changing course, finding customers, and discovering that a good product and a good business are not automatically the same thing.