Associate VP of Product

What This Role Is

The way students discover, choose, and move toward their futures is being rewritten. Not gradually. Structurally. AI is compressing timelines that used to take months into interactions that take minutes, and the platforms that serve this moment are either building for that reality or already falling behind it.

Manifest Global operates across five distinct AI-powered product platforms: Cialfo, BridgeU, Explore, FlowAI, and Student Recruitment. Each was built for a specific user, a specific workflow, a specific problem. Together they form something no competitor has: an end-to-end infrastructure for global human mobility. But a portfolio of five platforms, each with its own squad, stakeholders, and commercial logic, will fragment without someone who understands how the whole moves.

That is the gap this role exists to close. Not product management at the feature level; there are talented PMs doing that work across every brand. This is product leadership at the portfolio level: the person who holds the map of how every platform connects to every other, who makes the calls on what gets built and what gets retired, who sits with a business leader and translates commercial urgency into product reality. You own the entire product organisation. You set the direction. You build the team. You deliver the platform. You report to the CEO.

What You Own

• The product organisation and its people: hiring, development, and performance of all product managers, product designers, and product operations across every squad and brand, the operating standards that define what great product work looks like at Manifest, the career architecture that retains the best product talent, and the programme that closes the team’s AI fluency gap
• The cross-brand product portfolio: the map of how Cialfo, BridgeU, Explore, Kaaiser, and Student Recruitment interconnect, portfolio-level investment decisions on what to accelerate, integrate, or pause, and elimination of duplication that creates cost without user value
• Product-commercial alignment: the strategic translation layer between business unit leaders and product squads, the operating cadence by which priorities arrive and reasoned responses return, and the prioritisation framework that governs how resources move when every business leader believes their problem is most urgent
• Product-led growth and monetisation: the product organisation’s contribution to revenue expansion through pricing architecture, feature-driven upsell, and retention built into product strategy, measured in engagement, retention, and conversion, not just delivery
• Platform governance: the model for how product decisions get made at scale, how conflicts resolve, and the quality standards that hold across all five platforms
• AI nativeness: what AI-native product development means in practice at Manifest, embedded in how squads operate, with AI architecture as a first-order consideration rather than a retrofit

What You Bring

• Ten or more years in product, with substantial product leadership experience; the through-line is systems thinking applied to complex, multi-stakeholder environments
• You have led product across multiple products, not one product deeply: a portfolio with distinct commercial owners and competing claims on the same resources, where you made the calls on how resources moved
• Commercially, you think like a general manager: LTV, CAC, pricing architecture, and margin well enough to hold a point of view on product investment that connects to revenue targets
• You are genuinely AI-native, not performatively so: AI as a first-order design constraint, teams built to work that way, and credible conversations with both engineers and a CEO about the trade-offs
• You collaborate across functions without confusing collaboration with deference: you build alignment through relationships and reasoning, not authority, and ambiguity is where you do your best work
• Somewhere in there, you care about what this platform does: students using these products are making decisions that shape the trajectory of their lives

Why Manifest

Manifest Global is building the infrastructure for global human capital mobility, connecting students, schools, universities, and employers across 150+ countries. Our portfolio spans Cialfo (AI-powered college counseling, 2,000+ schools), BridgeU (university guidance for international schools globally), Kaaiser (trusted study abroad counseling since 1997), and Explore (AI-powered university outreach, 1,000+ university partners). $80M raised. Still early.

The product architecture at Manifest is still being written, and the person in this seat will answer the question of what this group looks like as a product platform in three years. Equity participation is part of the package for the right candidate.