Product Manager; Expertise​/PKM App

You've lived inside Roam, Notion, and Obsidian. You've built a second brain, rebuilt it twice, and have strong opinions about daily notes, backlinks, and progressive summarization. You've read everything Tiago Forte has written and argued with half of it. And somewhere along the way you started wondering: what if a tool like this didn't just store what you know, but actually taught you how to become an expert?

That's the job. Founders School is a 4-year program where teenagers build real companies targeting $1M in profit by graduation. Every great company starts with someone who knows a domain better than almost anyone. The Expertise App is how our students get there: a personal knowledge management tool where each student picks a focus area and builds a layered knowledge graph of facts, insights, and spiky points of view, proving genuine expertise they can build a business around.

We're hiring a Product Manager to own the Expertise App end to end. You don't write PRDs and hand them off. You open Claude, spin up the prototype yourself, and show up to the eng meeting with a working thing instead of a doc.

You own the Expertise App: its users, its roadmap, its quality, and whether it actually turns curious teenagers into people who know their domain cold. You're building the PKM tool you always wished existed, one that teaches the craft of becoming an expert instead of just giving you a blank page and a graph view.

You're with the students every week, watching how they capture, connect, and develop ideas and where they get stuck. You're with the program team, turning how we teach expertise into what the app has to do. And you're with engineering, turning all of that into shipped features on a weekly cadence. You build alongside the engineers, not just direct them.

• Sitting with students as they use the Expertise App, watching real usage instead of reading survey results. You know why a student stopped adding notes before the analytics do.

• Designing how a teenager goes from "I'm interested in X" to a real point of view: the capture habits, the structure, the prompts, and the feedback that make that happen.

• Bringing the best ideas from the PKM world (Building a Second Brain, Zettelkasten, evergreen notes, spaced repetition) into a tool built for 14-year-olds, and cutting what doesn't work for them.

• Prototyping features yourself. You build the first working version and bring it to engineering as a starting point, not a wishlist.

• Owning the roadmap and cadence. You decide what ships next, cut scope ruthlessly, and keep it moving weekly.

• Keeping the Expertise App's connections to the rest of our software clean, so a student's expertise flows into the content they post and the business they build.

• Writing PRDs and throwing them over the wall. You build.

• Building a generic note-taking app. Notion and Obsidian already exist. This one has a job: make students experts.

• Running a Jira board as your primary output.

• Coaching students on their businesses. Guides own that. You learn from students; you don't mentor them.

• Inventing the pedagogy. How we teach is the team's call. You turn it into product.

• Sitting remote. This role is in the building with the students and the team.

Monday in the student space. Three students can't tell the difference between an insight and a position, and the app isn't helping. You watch two of them hit the wall, talk to the third, and by Monday night you've prototyped a revised flow with a worked example baked in. Thursday it's live, and the next student gets through.

Wednesday deep dive. A student's graph has 200 notes and zero opinions. You pull up five more like it, spot the pattern, and sketch a…