Senior Product Manager

Job description

ABOUT US We’re a startup with big ambitions: to make estate planning modern, visual, and intelligent. Vanilla https://www.justvanilla.com/ is the first AI-powered estate advisory platform, built by advisors, planners, and attorneys to transform how wealth is transferred across generations. Our technology unifies scenario modeling, client visualization, and document creation into one seamless, digital experience. Our team brings together diverse subject matter expertise across estate planning, wealth management, and scaling SaaS startups. We’re distributed across the U.S., with a mix of fully remote and hybrid roles, and we embrace flexibility while staying closely connected. At Vanilla, you’ll join curious builders and problem-solvers who thrive on speed, autonomy, and impact. Here, you won’t just join a company, you’ll help create it. If you’re excited to tackle hard problems, move quickly, and see your work shape both an industry and a growing startup, we’d love to meet you. WORKING LOCATION This role is a remote position, you must be based out of one of the following states: Arizona,California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah or Washington JOB SUMMARY We’re looking for a Senior Product Manager to lead and evolve our estate planning platform. This is a uniquely impactful role: you’ll define how advisors interact with the estate platform in order to service their customers. This is a high-ambiguity environment. You’ll be building new capabilities across our AI powered product, document creation, platform and core application. Success requires balancing user needs, model behavior, legal constraints, and business priorities—often with incomplete information. RESPONSIBILITIES - Translate high-level direction into clear, buildable scopes without waiting for perfect inputs - Partner with product leadership on priorities, then own the execution end-to-end - Write crisp, detailed requirements and user stories that anticipate edge cases, failure states, and dependencies - Work closely with engineering to break work down, remove blockers, and keep momentum high - Define success metrics and build lightweight dashboards or queries to monitor them - Lead discovery yourself—interviews, workflow mapping, quick validation loops - Collaborate with design to rapidly prototype, test, and refine interaction patterns - Identify opportunities for simplification across the product workflows and contribute to architectural cleanup - Champion AI internally by using it in your workflow and helping teammates adopt AI-first processes - Find valuable ways to embed AI into the product experience to delight our customers. - Drive alignment across engineering, design, and GTM so shipped work stays coherent and connected - Ship quickly, measure, learn, and iterate REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS - 5+ years in product management, with direct ownership of shipping features - Experience working with commercial SaaS products, including embedded AI - ideally with hands-on familiarity (prompting, testing models, using AI tools to validate assumptions) - Comfortable turning messy, ambiguous problem spaces into structured, incremental delivery plans - Demonstrated ability to work closely with engineering and understand tradeoffs (latency, accuracy, model behavior, retrieval constraints) - Demonstrable use of AI tools in your own workflow (analysis, spec writing, research, QA) - Strong analytical skills and comfort working directly with data (SQL, Mixpanel, Looker, or similar is a plus) - Excellent written communication—you can write fast, clearly, and with enough precision for engineers to execute - Experience at startups, scale-ups, or any environment where velocity and autonomy matter - Experience in a SaaS company shipping commercial grade software PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS - Familiarity with LLMs, associated architectures, or prompt engineering at a working level - Exposure to or experience in fintech, wealthtech, or regulated industries - Background in B2B SaaS serving professional users (advisors, attorneys, accountants) - You've worked in high demand and velocity environments ✅ YOU MIGHT BE A GREAT FIT IF - Curious by default. You dig into how things work, especially when they're new. - Comfortable with "we don't know yet" as a starting point. - Direct. You say what you think, ask hard questions, and don't hide behind process. - Bias toward action. You'd rather ship and learn than wait for perfect information. - Grounded. You care about users, not just features The salary range for this role is $170,000 to $180,000. Our compensation packages also include a performance based bonus and equity. Compensation is based on a number of factors and may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. BENEFITS: - Flexible paid time off policy and 10 company-wide paid holidays - Parental leave, 6 weeks for all full-time employees and up to 14 weeks for birthing parents - Medical, dental, and vision benefits coverage for employees and their families - 401K eligibility after one month of employment - Free estate planning documents - Budget for learning & development and home office setup - Paid parking or transit for hybrid and in office employees Vanilla Technologies Inc. (dba "Vanilla") provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation and training. Vanilla participates in E-Verify and will provide the federal government with your Form I-9 information to confirm that you are authorized to work in the U.S.