Product Manager, Membership Growth and Development

ProPublica is an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest. 

We're looking for a creative product manager to expand and evolve the digital systems, experiences and experimentation engines that power ProPublica's fundraising and membership program. 

You'll work in close partnership with the membership team and colleagues across product and audience to illuminate and shape the journey readers take to become members who stay engaged over time. Your role is to bring our strategy to life through the systems, data and touchpoints that support it, contributing your product expertise to make it more effective.

This is a chance to grow the work of a mission-driven organization by bridging hands-on execution with longer-term strategy, and to help sustain independent journalism for the long term.

This role reports to the chief product and brand officer.

What You’ll Do

• Connect the product strategy, roadmap and day-to-day operations of ProPublica’s digital fundraising and membership systems, serving as the key product voice for donors across their entire journey.
• Translate organizational fundraising goals into clear product priorities, success metrics and technical decisions, balancing near-term optimization with longer-term improvements.
• Bridge the development and product teams, with input from across the organization, to ensure donation and membership experiences are built, optimized and maintained with rigor.
• Help us measure what matters by defining key metrics, orchestrating our systems to provide trusted data and insights, and regularly evaluating our progress. Working alongside an analyst, you’ll effectively communicate findings and tradeoffs and regularly report on progress and results as we refine our work.
• Use product judgment informed by data, technical knowledge, research and experimentation to improve donor acquisition, conversion rates, average gift size, recurring gifts and retention by surfacing recommendations and testing them collaboratively.
• Lead cross-functional work with engineers, designers and data analysts to define shared outcomes, write clear requirements and deliver reliable, scalable products, keeping partners across the organization informed and involved.
• Steward the health and evolution of the systems that power membership revenue, including donation platforms, payment processing, messaging, personalization and experimentation tools and the essential data integrations that connect them.
• Evaluate and manage the third-party platforms and vendors supporting reader revenue, recommending when to build, buy or integrate new systems. Configure integrations, automations and no-code solutions yourself and partner with engineers on deeper integrations when needed.

What You’ll Bring

• 3+ years experience and a track record managing consumer, subscriber or donor-supported products with complex user journeys and conversion funnels. Media or nonprofit experience is a plus.
• Experience working across technical and nontechnical teams, with a track record of navigating competing priorities and moving work forward through influence and trust.
• Comfort selecting, integrating and improving third-party platforms across CRM, CDP, ESP, A/B testing and payments, and experience with tools such as Salesforce, Braze, Piano and Stripe.
• Fluency with technical concepts and the ability to collaborate with engineers. You don’t need to write code, but you should discuss system architecture, APIs, schema and data models with confidence.
• Strong product judgment, using data, experimentation and qualitative insights to inform priorities and tradeoffs.
• Analytical rigor and hands-on experience with analytics platforms and experimentation tools. SQL fluency or other advanced data analysis skills are a plus.
• Strong project management skills, with the ability to prioritize work, manage dependencies and move multiple initiatives forward at once.
• The instinct to make ideas tangible early, whether that means wireframing on a whiteboard or in Figma, writing a persuasive PRD or prototyping a quick demo.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to listen well, clearly explain complex ideas, surface risks and align stakeholders.
• Curiosity, adaptability and a genuine interest in how membership revenue sustains independent journalism.
• Ability to travel, as needed, for team summits, meetings and training. 

This job is full time and includes benefits. ProPublica is based in New York, but we’re open to remote candidates. We have offices in New York City; Washington, D.C.; Atlanta; Chicago; Phoenix; and Berkeley, California. Applicants must be eligible to work in the U.S.

This job is covered under the terms of a collective bargaining agreement with The NewsGuild of New York, Local 31003, CWA, AFL-CIO.

The expected salary range for this position is $90,000 to $145,000.

This is a good-faith estimate of what we expect to pay for this position. The final salary figure will take into account a person’s experience, accomplishment and location. ProPublica is committed to paying its staff equitably, and these ranges should not be considered career salary limits or caps.

We will begin reviewing applications as we receive them, but we will continue to consider candidates as long as the posting remains live on our site.

Questions? Send an email to talent@propublica.org. 

No phone calls, please.

We know there are great candidates who may not fit into what we’ve described above or who have important skills we haven’t thought of. If that’s you, don’t hesitate to apply and tell us about yourself.

We are dedicated to improving our newsroom, in part by better reflecting the people we cover. (Here is a breakdown of our staff.) We are committed to diversity and building an inclusive environment for people of all backgrounds and ages. And we are taking steps to meet that commitment. We especially encourage members of traditionally underrepresented communities to apply, including women, people of color, LGBTQ+ people and people with disabilities. We are an equal opportunity employer and prohibit discrimination and harassment of any kind. All employment decisions are made without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, age or any other status protected under applicable law.