Head of Product - Product Lead

About Manta Cares

Navigating cancer is like embarking on a treacherous hike without a map, gear, or guide. Manta Cares is a beloved AI patient platform. We support cancer patients & their families through every one of the 500+ decisions that they will navigate.

We are a digital health company founded and led by cancer patients, survivors, caregivers, and oncologists. We’re already partnering with several top life sciences companies (e.g., Gilead, Novartis), and healthcare systems. Our team brings over 50 years of combined healthcare experience, with backgrounds at McKinsey, BCG, Stanford, MIT, Harvard, IDEO, and ASCO. Backed by top-tier venture funds including Pear Ventures, Sozo Ventures, and 1843 Capital.

Head of Product / Product Lead

Product | Manta Cares | Hybrid, San Francisco Bay Area | Reports to the CEO

About Manta Cares

Navigating cancer is like embarking on a treacherous hike without a map, gear, or guide. Manta Cares is a beloved AI patient app. We support cancer patients & their families through every one of the 500+ decisions that they will navigate. We were founded by a cancer survivor who lived the problem firsthand. She first built a paper-based planner that helped thousands of patients navigate treatment, and those learnings became the foundation for everything we build today.

We are a digital health company founded and led by cancer patients, survivors, caregivers, and oncologists. We’re already partnering with several top life sciences companies (e.g., Gilead, Novartis), and healthcare systems. Our platform is trusted by four of the top 15 pharmaceutical manufacturers. Our team brings over 50 years of combined healthcare experience, with backgrounds at McKinsey, BCG, Stanford, MIT, Harvard, IDEO, and ASCO. Backed by top-tier venture funds including Pear Ventures, Sozo Ventures, and 1843 Capital.

The Opportunity

We have built a beloved patient base and a proprietary clinical map of the cancer experience, the most comprehensive representation of the entire cancer experience, from diagnosis through survivorship, built with more than 100 medical professionals and thousands of patients and care partners. Hope, our AI companion, is grounded on that map, and it is not a generic chatbot. Hope understands where a patient is in their cancer experience and uses that context to help them understand symptoms, prepare for conversations with their doctors, navigate testing and treatment decisions, and know when to escalate to their care team. Scaling our user base while balancing engagement with new capabilities, quarter after quarter, is how we win.

This is Manta's senior product hire: a product owner who turns the clinical map and our quarterly goals into shipped product, and who can hold their own with a strong engineering team. You will report directly to the CEO and be her product point person. This is a Head of Product role, starting as an IC and then over time managing a team. You own the roadmap, you make the calls, you ship. The seniority is the point: you are senior enough to lead a product even when the CEO disagrees, not so senior that you have stopped building.

If you own product end to end, engage real clinical depth, are credible with strong engineers, and want your work to directly improve the lives of cancer patients, we would love to meet you.

This role is based in San Francisco and is hybrid — 2 days a week in our SF office.

What You'll Do

• Own the product function end to end: roadmap, backlog, prioritization, and build/test cycles. You are the CEO's product point person.

• Develop and own a strong point-of-view. Write down and maintain a clear product strategy aligned with Manta Cares strategy and goals.

• Decide what gets built. Maintain a prioritized product roadmap. Take the next most important question and make the call, so the CEO is not the bottleneck.

• Engage the clinical map and care pathways. Work directly with our Chief Medical Officer to keep cancer maps clinically sound and translate it into product.

• Counterbalance a strong engineering team. Be credible with senior engineers, diagnose velocity, and push back technically when it matters.

• Lead with Empathy. Turn desirability into clear UX decisions and hold a real feel for the patient experience, not a feature list.

• Translate commercial into product. Turn a pharma or partner ask into something we can build and ship.

• Work AI-native. Use AI in your daily practice as a matter of course. This is table stakes.

• Run on data and first principles. Instrument what matters, run experiments, and let evidence settle the call. Bias to action over debate.

What We're Looking For

You Must Have

• Product ownership (6+ years): you have set a roadmap, run a backlog, sequenced and shipped, and cut things people wanted. You are a product owner, not a designer, not an engineer.

• Clinical/ Scientific / Healthcare domain: you engage the clinical map and care pathways directly, and can go deep with a CMO. Not a generic tech PM who needs the clinical content explained. Oncology itself is not required. We can teach the disease; what matters is getting credible on the map fast.

• Engineering literacy: you are credible with strong engineers, can diagnose what is happening with velocity, and can push back technically without being steamrolled.

• Seniority and judgment: battle-tested, with strong opinions loosely held. Senior enough that the CEO will follow your lead, and still hands-on enough to do the work. You influence across the organization: clinicians, engineering and product leaders, and the CEO.

• User-centered product sense: you start from desirability and turn it into clear UX decisions. Design-literate.

• Commercial translation: you turn a pharma or partner ask into a product, and AI is already part of how you work.

• Data-driven and first-principles: you reason from first principles, run experiments, and own outcomes rather than output. Comfortable moving fast and navigating ambiguity at an early-stage company.

For a great fit:

• Temperament (we weigh this above the resume, and screen it before craft): fit with a fast, high-intensity founder is the crux of this hire.

• Holds the line: disagrees, brings evidence, and does not fold when the team pushes, then commits once it is decided.

• Emotionally steady under intensity: absorbs speed and directness with high EQ, and manages the room, not just the logic.

• Low ego, high ownership: comfortable being the single owner for a product; celebrates the team and does not need the spotlight.

• Decisive in ambiguity: makes the call with incomplete information, writes it down, and corrects fast.

• Builder bias, not process bias: adds the lightest structure that works and ships, rather than adding ceremony.

• Builds trust fast: this role is a close partnership with the CEO. You challenge ideas thoughtfully, earn confidence quickly, and stay highly collaborative while being comfortable with strong opinions and disagreement.

Bonus Points

• You are a clinician or MD who moved into product.

• You have consumer-mobile depth.

• You have founder or operator experience: you have owned outcomes, not just features.

• You have a personal pull toward the cancer space.

• You have lifecycle product experience: you have owned activation and retention, and can move engagement metrics.

Note: we can teach you our platform and our stack. We cannot teach product ownership, clinical curiosity, or the judgment to hold your own with strong engineers. Oncology domain depth is strongly preferred; a genuine willingness to go deep on the clinical content is required.

This Role Is NOT For You If

• You are really a designer, or really an engineer or CTO, rather than a product owner.

• Your experience is big-company only, with no real ownership of prioritization or shipping.

• You cannot engage clinical depth and need it all explained to you.

• You are so senior that you will not stay hands-on.

• You wait for a roadmap to be handed to you.

• You need consensus or the CEO’s sign-off to make a call.

• You fold under pressure, or fight ego battles instead of the problem.

• You add process and ceremony instead of tightening the loop and shipping.

Compensation & Equity

• Base: $200k-$220k/year

• Equity: Competitive (4-year vest, 1-year cliff)

• Health: Comprehensive medical, vision, and dental

• PTO: Unlimited

How to Apply

Apply with your resume. Before we schedule a call, we will ask you to come prepared to walk one product you owned end to end: what you chose to build and why, what you cut, how you sequenced it, the hardest prioritization call you made, and how you worked with engineering to ship it. We speak with past managers and dig into ownership claims as part of our process.