What are the responsibilities and job description for the Senior Product Manager, Growth position at Novo?
Company Description
Novo is a venture-backed fintech that simplifies banking for small businesses. Since our Fall 2018 beta launch, we've expanded offerings from free checking accounts and debit cards to lending products, business tools (invoices, bookkeeping, and more), and integrations.
Today, Novo is a powerfully simple banking platform that serves over 250,000 small businesses. In addition to providing smart tools built for entrepreneurs to better run and grow their businesses, Novo has processed billions in transactions in partnership with a number of established banking partners.
Our vision is to be the go-to platform serving small businesses – from launch to everyday – so business owners can focus on growing, while Novo provides seamless money movement, money storage, and access to capital. We'd like to look back 5–10 years from now and know that we helped new generations of small businesses succeed because of the work we did at Novo.
Novo raised $170 million in venture capital and is backed by leading investors, including Stripes, Valar Ventures, Crosslink Capital, and Notable Capital (formerly GGV). Learn more at https://www.novo.co.
Role Description
Novo is seeking a highly experienced and motivated growth product leader to own and scale how we acquire, activate, and retain small businesses. This role is critical to driving sustainable, data-driven growth across the funnel — from awareness through conversion to long-term retention and product depth — while serving as a strategic partner to the executive, product, and marketing teams in a dynamic, regulated fintech environment. The ideal candidate is a hands-on builder who can run rigorous experimentation, translate company objectives into a clear growth roadmap, give our products a sharp point of view that resonates with the right customers, and leverage AI to accelerate experimentation velocity, discovery, and the day-to-day work of growth. This is a high-impact, high-visibility role with significant exposure to leadership, product, growth marketing, and our customer base.
Responsibilities
Growth Strategy & Leadership
Novo is a venture-backed fintech that simplifies banking for small businesses. Since our Fall 2018 beta launch, we've expanded offerings from free checking accounts and debit cards to lending products, business tools (invoices, bookkeeping, and more), and integrations.
Today, Novo is a powerfully simple banking platform that serves over 250,000 small businesses. In addition to providing smart tools built for entrepreneurs to better run and grow their businesses, Novo has processed billions in transactions in partnership with a number of established banking partners.
Our vision is to be the go-to platform serving small businesses – from launch to everyday – so business owners can focus on growing, while Novo provides seamless money movement, money storage, and access to capital. We'd like to look back 5–10 years from now and know that we helped new generations of small businesses succeed because of the work we did at Novo.
Novo raised $170 million in venture capital and is backed by leading investors, including Stripes, Valar Ventures, Crosslink Capital, and Notable Capital (formerly GGV). Learn more at https://www.novo.co.
Role Description
Novo is seeking a highly experienced and motivated growth product leader to own and scale how we acquire, activate, and retain small businesses. This role is critical to driving sustainable, data-driven growth across the funnel — from awareness through conversion to long-term retention and product depth — while serving as a strategic partner to the executive, product, and marketing teams in a dynamic, regulated fintech environment. The ideal candidate is a hands-on builder who can run rigorous experimentation, translate company objectives into a clear growth roadmap, give our products a sharp point of view that resonates with the right customers, and leverage AI to accelerate experimentation velocity, discovery, and the day-to-day work of growth. This is a high-impact, high-visibility role with significant exposure to leadership, product, growth marketing, and our customer base.
Responsibilities
Growth Strategy & Leadership
- Develop and execute a growth product strategy aligned with Novo's mission, growth objectives, and unit economics.
- Serve as a key strategic partner to the executive, product, and growth marketing teams, providing data-driven insight to guide major business decisions.
- Translate high-level company objectives into a prioritized growth roadmap, connecting fast-moving experimentation to the long-term strategic arc rather than chasing short-term, disconnected wins.
- Give Novo's products a clear point of view — defining who each product is for, what value it delivers, and why it resonates — so we serve the right customers rather than building for everyone and no one.
- Own the full growth funnel across acquisition, activation, conversion, monetization, and retention, with a clear view of how each stage drives unit economics (LTV, CAC, and payback).
- Design, run, and scale a rigorous A/B testing and experimentation program, including landing pages, messaging, onboarding, pricing, and personalization.
- Favor rigorous, cohort-based analysis over surface-level correlation when evaluating performance and informing investment decisions, while staying comfortable acting on directional data when speed and urgency demand it.
- Partner with Product, Engineering, Design, and Growth Marketing to productionalize winning experiments and turn learnings into durable, scalable product features.
- Improve conversion rate across the marketing site and onboarding by clarifying value props, reducing friction, and meeting the right message to the right customer at the right moment.
- Strengthen awareness and top-of-funnel performance in partnership with growth marketing, including SEO, AEO/LLM-driven discovery, organic channels (e.g., Reddit, social), affiliates, and educational content that compares Novo clearly against alternatives.
- Drive retention and stickiness by increasing the number of Novo products each customer uses, deepening engagement, and ensuring real value is transacted rather than relying on incentives or short-term lock-ins.
- Establish honest, market-comparable definitions of churn, retention, and cohort health, redefining metrics where current measurement flatters the numbers.
- Use AI to multiply experimentation throughput — generating and testing variants of copy, landing pages, onboarding flows, and lifecycle messaging far faster than manual production allows.
- Lead Novo's approach to AI-driven discovery and AEO/LLM search, ensuring the brand and products surface accurately and favorably as customers increasingly research and compare options through AI assistants.
- Apply AI to analysis and personalization — accelerating cohort analysis, surfacing patterns in funnel data, and tailoring experiences to customer segments — while pressure-testing AI-generated conclusions against rigorous evidence.
- Champion AI tooling across the growth workflow (research synthesis, drafting, instrumentation, reporting) to raise the team's velocity and quality, and partner with Data, Risk, Compliance, and Legal so AI-driven targeting and messaging meet the privacy, fairness, transparency, and regulatory bar required in financial services.
- Stay abreast of the rapidly evolving AI landscape and apply informed judgment to distinguish durable capability from hype when making build-vs-buy decisions on tools and models.
- Partner with Product and Engineering to set targets, track KPIs, and translate growth insights into operating plans, resolving tensions between growth, product, and other priorities using data, impact, resourcing, and risk as the shared standard.
- Bring your own hypotheses, prove them through experimentation, and hand off validated, scalable wins to product — establishing clear ownership of where growth executes independently versus where cross-functional investment is required.
- Run a consistent operating cadence (e.g., weekly working sessions) with product and engineering to maintain alignment, surface friction early, and make decisions that optimize for the global maximum rather than each team's local maximum.
- Monitor key growth metrics daily, distinguish signal from noise, and take timely action when results diverge from expectations.
- Build and maintain the analytics, instrumentation, and tooling needed to measure the funnel end-to-end and attribute impact across channels and experiments.
- Define and own the growth KPIs that matter at each stage of the company, ensuring leadership has a shared, realistic view of performance and forecasts.
- Pressure-test conclusions drawn from data, acknowledge the limits of directional or low-volume signals, and remain willing to be proven wrong by evidence.
- Lead, mentor, and grow a high-performing growth team, fostering a culture of velocity, experimentation, intellectual honesty, and continuous improvement.
- Establish scalable systems, tools, and processes for experimentation and growth that grow with the company.
- Manage relationships with growth vendors, tooling partners, and cross-functional stakeholders across product, marketing, and engineering.
- 10 years of progressive experience in growth, product, or growth marketing, with at least 3–5 years in a senior growth or product leadership role (preferably in fintech, financial services, or subscription/consumer businesses).
- Demonstrable experience building and scaling growth and experimentation functions in a high-growth environment, with a track record of measurable improvements in conversion, retention, and unit economics.
- Strong understanding of growth fundamentals across the full funnel — acquisition, activation, conversion, monetization, and retention — and how they connect to LTV, CAC, and payback.
- Deep, hands-on expertise with A/B testing, experimentation tooling, personalization, and cohort-based analysis, with the judgment to know when data is conclusive versus directional.
- Experience using AI to accelerate experimentation, content, and analysis, with sound judgment about where AI adds real value and where it introduces risk — plus familiarity with how AI-driven discovery (AEO/LLM search) is reshaping awareness and consideration.
- Proven ability to partner with and influence product and engineering teams, resolve cross-functional tension with data, and communicate effectively with technical and non-technical stakeholders, including leadership.
- Experience giving products a clear point of view and value proposition, and aligning growth initiatives to long-term strategy rather than short-term tactics.
- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with a proactive, data-driven approach to growth.
- Familiarity with modern discovery and awareness channels — including SEO, AEO/LLM-driven search, organic, affiliate, and content — is highly desirable.
- Ability to thrive in a fast-paced, evolving startup environment.
- Bachelor's degree required; advanced degree or relevant analytical/technical background preferred.