Product Manager - Digital Audience and Engagement

Job Description

Hearst Television is looking for a growth‑focused Product Manager to drive audience expansion and deepen loyalty across our multi‑platform digital ecosystem. While our platforms reach millions, your mission is to convert casual visitors into a loyal, engaged audience. You will lead the experimentation roadmap, optimizing the journey from a user’s first discovery of a Hearst story to becoming a daily active habit.

Reporting to the Director of Digital Growth Initiatives, you will sit at the intersection of product, engineering, and editorial. You are a specialist in the “Growth Loop”—using data to identify friction points, running A/B tests to drive engagement, and building features that keep our audience coming back during the news cycles that matter most.

This role is well suited for a highly proactive product manager who thrives in ambiguity, identifies opportunities independently, and moves quickly from insight to action. You’ll be expected to proactively surface hypotheses, propose experiments, and drive execution across multiple teams—often before a problem is fully defined.

• Strategic Experimentation:
  Own the ideation, execution, and analysis of the growth experimentation roadmap. Build, test, and scale features designed to increase Recency, Frequency, and Monetary value (RFM) of our audience.
• Engagement Strategy:
  Identify and develop features that encourage deeper content consumption, such as personalized feeds, “follow” mechanics, and saved content.
• Lifecycle Optimization & ESP Management:
  Own the technical health and strategy of our user lifecycle. This includes optimizing app onboarding, newsletter acquisition funnels, and managing the configuration of our ESP (e.g., Braze) to ensure high deliverability and personalized user journeys.
• Behavioral Data Analysis:
  Go beyond “system health” to “user health.” Monitor churn signals and engagement cohorts to identify whitespace opportunities for new growth features.
• Cross‑Functional
  
  Collaboration:
  
  Partner with the Newsroom, Data and Engineering teams to align product features with audience acquisition campaigns and editorial tentpoles (e.g., Election cycles, Severe Weather).
• Backlog & Requirement Engineering:
  Translate complex stakeholder needs and newsroom requirements into actionable user stories with clear technical acceptance criteria.
• Agile Delivery for Growth:
  Manage a high‑velocity backlog of growth‑oriented user stories, prioritizing initiatives that promise the highest impact on DAU/MAU and retention metrics.

• Engagement & Mar Tech Architecture:
  Advanced proficiency in configuring engagement platforms (Braze, Iterable, Airship). Proficiency with Liquid logic, API‑triggered campaigns, webhooks, push notification payloads, deep‑linking, media attachments, TTL.
• Retention & CRM Tooling:
  Deep experience with automated, behavior‑triggered messaging journeys. Ability to map user events from the app/web layers to the CRM to trigger real‑time, contextually relevant interactions.
• Testing & Analytics:
  Mastery of A/B testing frameworks and behavioral analytics tools (GA4, Mixpanel, Amplitude, Maze) to validate hypotheses and measure incrementality.
• SEO & Discovery:
  Foundational understanding of how product choices impact search visibility and social discovery, driving top‑of‑funnel organic growth.
• Personalization & AI:
  Familiarity with recommendation engines and leveraging AI/ML to deliver the right content to the right user at the right time.
• Modern Growth Stack:
  Proficiency in Jira/Confluence for workflow and good grasp of data visualization tools (Looker, Power
  
  BI) to communicate growth wins to leadership.

• Experience:
  
  4–6 years in Product Management, with a clear focus on Growth, Retention, or Consumer Engagement (Digital Media or News experience is a major plus).
• Growth Architect:
  Proven ability to not just execute tickets, but to define the “What” and the “Why” behind a growth roadmap based on competitive gaps and user data.
• Analytical Storytelling:
  Exceptional ability to turn complex cohort data into clear narratives for stakeholders, explaining not just what…