Product Manager, Lab

📋 Description

• • Are you a visionary Product Manager with a passion for exploring the frontiers of technology and a proven track record of navigating high-uncertainty environments? Fundraise Up, a leading global fundraising platform, is seeking an exceptional Product Manager to join our innovative 'Lab' team. This is a unique opportunity to shape the future of digital fundraising by identifying, validating, and de-risking bold, high-upside product opportunities that lie beyond our current core offerings. If you thrive on reducing uncertainty, making critical decisions, and learning at an accelerated pace, this role is for you.
• • At Fundraise Up, we empower nonprofits to raise more funds through seamless, high-converting donation experiences. Our technology is trusted by impactful organizations worldwide, processing millions of dollars in donations monthly. As we continue to scale our core platform, we are strategically investing in groundbreaking product bets that have the potential to redefine the fundraising landscape. The Lab is at the heart of this strategic investment, tasked with exploring these high-risk, high-reward initiatives.
• • As a Product Manager within the Lab, your primary objective is not to ship features, but to systematically reduce uncertainty around new product ideas. You will own concepts from their nascent stages – early exploration, hypothesis framing, and rapid experimentation – through to making explicit investment decisions: to scale, pivot, or kill. The expectation is that most ideas will be terminated early, with only a select few demonstrating sufficient promise to graduate to our New Markets or Core product teams, backed by robust evidence.
• • Success in this role is defined by the speed of learning and the quality of decision-making, rather than the volume of output or adoption metrics. You will be instrumental in identifying emerging opportunities driven by new technologies, artificial intelligence, advanced data analytics, evolving platform capabilities, or significant infrastructure shifts. Your ability to translate nascent signals and technical possibilities into clear, testable product hypotheses will be crucial.
• • You will maintain an active exploration backlog, meticulously documenting risks, assumptions, and learning objectives for each initiative. A key part of your role involves designing experiments that directly address the single riskiest assumption for each hypothesis. Before any development begins, you will define explicit kill criteria, ensuring that resources are not wasted on unpromising ventures. You will be adept at choosing the appropriate fidelity for experiments, ranging from low-fidelity prototypes and technical spikes to Wizard-of-Oz tests and live pilots, always building just enough to learn.
• • Executing scrappy, minimal-scope MVPs and pilots will be a regular part of your work. You will collaborate closely with Engineering, Design, Data, and Go-to-Market teams throughout the experimentation process, ruthlessly prioritizing learning speed over premature optimization. Your ability to synthesize experimental results into clear, opinionated recommendations – Scale, Iterate, or Kill – will be paramount. You will communicate findings effectively, articulating what was tested, what was learned, and what uncertainties remain.
• • A critical aspect of this role is the commitment to avoiding 'zombie initiatives'; every experiment must culminate in a decisive action. You must be willing to kill your own ideas when the evidence suggests they are not viable. When an opportunity shows strong potential, you will prepare it for a seamless handoff to the appropriate team, providing validated value and problem hypotheses, experimental evidence, clear risk assessments, success metrics, and a proposed ownership and scaling model. The Lab's mandate is exploration, not ongoing product management of scaled solutions.
• • Transparency and knowledge sharing are core to the Lab's function. You will maintain a visible portfolio of ongoing explorations, detailing the 'what,' 'why,' and current 'signals.' You will publish decision memos and learning summaries, and openly share learnings from failed experiments when they offer valuable insights. You will also leverage modern AI tools to accelerate research, synthesis, prototyping, and experimentation, exploring AI-enabled product ideas with a realistic understanding of costs, latency, data requirements, and accuracy, distinguishing genuine capability shifts from mere hype.
• • This role involves launching high-risk, high-signal initiatives. You will selectively initiate bold projects even when short-term adoption is uncertain, treating these launches as genuine product bets designed to test future categories, influence market perception, and showcase technical leadership. You will be explicit about the intent behind each launch – whether it's for learning, creating future optionality, or external signaling.
• • This is an individual contributor role, akin to a Senior or Principal Product Manager, requiring strong independent judgment and minimal need for process oversight. You will be expected to drive initiatives forward with autonomy and a clear vision.