Product Manager

Liminal; Boston (MA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Liminal, a Founders’ Studio in Boston, seeks a Product Manager to translate founder dreams, user needs, and technical feasibility into tangible bets. You’ll operate in a zero-to-one environment with no mature roadmap and a sense of urgency around delivering value.

You will talk to users, study markets, and balance what users say they need with what is technically feasible and what the business can sustain. You’ll craft a pragmatic product vision and lead cross-functional teams to validate

Qualifications

• 5+ years in product management with strong judgment and pattern recognition.
• Experience shipping zero-to-one products or early-stage ventures.
• Ability to balance user needs, technical feasibility, and business viability.

Responsibilities

• Find the problem before falling in love with the solution. Talk to users, study customers, tear apart the market, and use human-centered research to uncover true needs.
• Decide what gets built by turning inputs into a product vision, MVP, and a clear sequence of bets; prioritize ruthlessly.
• Keep the team problem-centric; steer conversations back to the core problem we’re solving.
• Run the evidence loop: define hypotheses, design tests, and refine or pivot based on results.
• Build roadmaps with engineering and product teams to translate choices into deliverables.
• Prove there’s a business underneath the product by linking roadmap to business model and customer value.

Job description

Product Manager

You’re the translator between what a founder dreams, what a user needs, and what can actually be built before the money runs out. That three-way negotiation is the entire job.

The Short Version

You’re the translator between what a founder dreams, what a user needs, and what can actually be built before the money runs out. That three-way negotiation is the entire job.

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.