Lead Product Manager – Product Innovation

About NewsBreak

Local life runs on local information. What happened down the street? Who can fix this? Where should we go tonight? NewsBreak started in 2015 to answer these questions, and today more than 40 million people a month rely on us to follow what’s going on in their zip code.

Three platforms with one vision: powering local life. Led by founder and CEO Jeff Zheng, NewsBreak is our local life and news platform; Nearby AI connects people with local businesses; and NDot AI helps publishers and creators grow and earn.

Building for the long term. A $115 million Series C made us a unicorn in 2021, and we keep investing in our people. We’re Great Place to Work® certified and named to Fast Company’s Best Workplaces for Innovators (2025) and Fortune’s Best Workplaces in the Bay Area™ (2026).

Everyone makes an impact. Whether you write code, shape products, tell our story, or run the business, we want people who own projects end to end, stay curious, and speak up. Join us.

Learn more at: NewsBreak, Nearby AI, NDot AI

Why this role exists

Growth today comes primarily from recommendation-algorithm tuning and paid acquisition. A product-driven growth curve does not yet exist. This role turns “where is the next curve?” from an open question into a series of hypotheses that can be validated — or disproven — quickly.

What you'll own

• AI-native product formats
• New ways people consume local information
• New direction validation on Scoopz
• Turning vague directions into falsifiable hypotheses, then testing them fast
• Handing validated directions to the Senior PM to scale
• Not local vertical framework build-out — a separate team owns that; the boundary is explicit

What we're looking for

• 8+ years in consumer product, including 3+ in 0→1 or new-direction work
• A concrete story where data overturned your own judgment
• A track record of killing a direction yourself, with clear reasoning
• Strong analytics: you pull your own data, design experiments, read results
• You instinctively ask “how do users solve this today?” and “what's the switching cost?”
• Industry open. Consumer high-frequency products preferred (content, social, local, utility)
• AI product experience not required — the methods transfer, and requiring it only shrinks the pool

First 90 days

• Form and prioritize 3–5 testable direction hypotheses
• Reach a conclusion — validated or disproven — on at least one
• Establish the process: how hypotheses get proposed, tested, and killed

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