Principal Product Manager, Engagement

Lead a core pillar of Upstart's Growth strategy focused on User Engagement. Drive user activity, retention, and repeat usage through compelling, value-driven product experiences. Shape how customers interact with Upstart beyond the initial transaction by building in-product experiences and touchpoints that deepen trust, promote financial wellness, and unlock new monetization pathways. Operate cross-functionally at the intersection of product, design, engineering, data science, and marketing. Balance bold bets with iterative testing using behavioral insights and product mechanics to build habit-forming experiences serving user needs and business outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Define and deliver the vision for engagement across Upstart’s ecosystem on web and mobile platforms.
• Champion the user journey by crafting intuitive and rewarding experiences that build trust and increase lifetime value.
• Partner with consumer research, product marketing, and data teams to ground work in real-world behaviors and motivations.
• Drive experimentation at scale using rapid iteration and clear metrics to test what works.
• Identify levers for activation, retention, and repeat engagement; align stakeholders around promising paths forward.
• Collaborate across product lines to create a cohesive experience across Upstart’s offerings ensuring engagement efforts align with company goals.
• Balance vision and execution by making strategic trade-offs between short-term optimization and long-term differentiation.
• Shape a roadmap prioritizing measurable impact while investing in foundational capabilities for sustained growth.

Minimum Qualifications

• 10+ years of product management experience.
• Strong track record driving consumer engagement, growth, or retention for digital products.
• Deep fluency in product discovery and hypothesis-driven development including A/B testing, experimentation frameworks, success metric definition.
• Exceptional collaboration skills with ability to align diverse stakeholders from executives to cross-functional partners around shared strategy.
• User-first mindset capable of distilling complex customer insights into elegant, high-utility product experiences.
• Strong judgment and prioritization skills to identify high-leverage opportunities and navigate trade-offs confidently.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building consumer products for technology companies in highly regulated industries (financial services, healthcare).
• Proven track record building/scaling multi-product ecosystems or marketplaces in B2C environments.
• Strong customer-centric mindset translating customer insights into actionable product features/enhancements.

Location Information

• Position location: Remote
• Employees can live/work anywhere in the U.S. but encouraged to spend quality time collaborating in-person via regular onsites (1–2 times per quarter for 2–4 consecutive days).
• Offices located in Columbus, Austin, Bay Area, New York City (opening Summer 2026).

Remote Work Mention

• Majority of work can be accomplished remotely as Upstart is a digital-first company.

Employment Type

• Not explicitly stated; implied full-time based on role description.

Experience Level

• Mid-Senior level (#LI-MidSenior)

Skills Mentioned

• Product management
• Consumer engagement
• Growth strategies
• Retention strategies
• Product discovery
• Hypothesis-driven development
• A/B testing
• Experimentation frameworks
• Success metric definition
• Collaboration across stakeholders
• User journey design
• Behavioral insights application
• Strategic prioritization
• Multi-product ecosystem scaling