Staff Product Manager - VPN (Remote)

Who We Are (Mode.Inc)

Mode.Inc is the parent company of a portfolio of technology businesses, including Mode Mobile, the creator of EarnOS, a transformational software platform that turns ordinary smartphones into "EarnPhones". This innovation empowers users worldwide to monetize everyday mobile activities such as streaming, gaming, and shopping. We enable users to profit from their data and attention, rather than letting only tech giants benefit. What sets us apart is our inclusive approach, converting users into earners, facilitating over $150M in earnings and savings, and going a step further by turning earners into owners by awarding stock ownership in Mode.Inc based on their usage. We have attracted over 40 million users across 170 countries.

Mode Mobile, Inc. Ranked Number 1 Fastest Growing Company in North America on the 2023 Deloitte Technology Fast 500.

For additional insights, check out information about our reward-based super app, Mode Earn App, which also powers the reward engine for our proprietary smartphone, Mode Earn Phone.

Our Team and Culture Drive Our Success

Our team is the heart of our culture.  We value innovation, collaboration, and curiosity, with a passion for getting things done.  We strive to hire and cultivate the best team members and foster a culture of open communication and transparency.  We are driven and hard-working but also committed to having fun along the way.  We allow OKRs to guide us, assume positive intent, sometimes agree to disagree and commit, honor our commitments, seek to accomplish more with less, and encourage everyone to speak up as our team owns our company’s success.

You can read more about our team and how we work here.

The Role

Mode.Inc is seeking a Staff Product Manager to own product for a newly acquired consumer VPN business in a new business unit. It is a highly rated, established app with a global user base across both iOS and Android, and a subscription business generating eight figures in annual revenue. This is a senior-level, high-ownership role reporting directly to the General Manager.

The business joins Mode.Inc as a standalone business unit with a dedicated team being built around it. You will be the first product owner, which means you set the strategy, define the roadmap, and establish the measurement and experimentation foundation the business will run on for years.

The mandate has two halves. The first is to grow the existing subscription business: sharper paywalls, better pricing and packaging, stronger trial conversion, and a connection experience users rely on. The second is to open an entirely new one, a free ad-supported tier that expands the top of the funnel and monetizes the users who will never pay a subscription. Mode.Inc has deep in-house expertise in ad and subscription monetization across a portfolio of apps, and you will have that team behind you.

If you want a product role with a real business underneath it and genuine room to define what comes next, this is that role.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the product roadmap end to end, from strategy and prioritization through specification and delivery, in partnership with Engineering, Design, Monetization, UA, and Data.
• Own business and product performance: revenue, trial-to-paid conversion, retention, churn, LTV, ARPDAU, and contribution to the business unit P&L.
• Define and drive the subscription experience across three purchase paths (Google Play, Apple App Store, and a direct web checkout), including paywall design, pricing and packaging, trial mechanics, and account management.
• Design and launch a free, ad-supported tier, including the free/paid feature boundary, session and data limits, and the upgrade moments that convert free users into subscribers.
• Own the hybrid monetization model end to end: rewarded video, interstitial and native placements, mediation and waterfall performance, eCPM and fill, and the tradeoff between ad revenue and subscription conversion. Getting this balance right is one of the defining product problems of the role.
• Partner with Monetization and Legal to ensure subscription disclosures, price display, cancellation mechanisms, and ad experiences meet Apple, Google, and applicable consumer-protection requirements.
• Own analytics requirements and launch readiness as the app moves onto Mode.Inc's unified event-tracking stack. Define the event spine, build the dashboards, and establish the baselines the team will manage against.
• Stand up a durable experimentation practice across paywall, onboarding, pricing, ad load, and retention, and hold the bar on experiment design and readout quality.
• Translate user research, customer feedback, and competitive intelligence into a prioritized product backlog.
• Partner with UA on scaling paid acquisition profitably: creative strategy, funnel performance, conversion tracking integrity, geo and cohort targeting, and ROAS accountability, including the improved blended economics a free tier makes possible.
• Establish the patterns for a growing portfolio. This is the first product in Mode.Inc's Communications Apps and Services business unit, and we may add more through both acquisition and internal development. The monetization models, analytics standards, experimentation practice, and launch playbooks you build here become the foundation each subsequent app inherits, and as the portfolio grows, so does the scope of this role.
• Provide clear, regular visibility into business performance to the GM and executive stakeholders.

Who You Are

• A strategic, business-minded product leader who is comfortable owning revenue, not just shipping features.
• Fluent in hybrid monetization. You understand how ad load, paywall placement, and subscription pricing interact, and your opinions are grounded in results rather than theory.
• Rigorous about subscription mechanics: you know what moves trial conversion, what causes involuntary churn, and why plan cadence changes user behavior.
• A self-starter who thrives with white space and high autonomy.
• Data-fluent and appropriately skeptical. You build the instrumentation you need rather than waiting for someone to hand you a dashboard.
• A strong operator across time zones and functions, with the judgment to know when to decide and when to escalate.
• A clear writer and communicator who can move between an engineering thread and an executive readout without losing precision.
• Alignment with our core values:
• Accountable: You take ownership of your responsibilities, demonstrating trustworthiness and self-discipline. You are consistent in your work, transparent in your actions, and communicate effectively. You follow through on commitments and strive for continuous improvement.
• Action-driven: Identify what is most important, agree on scope, execute in a timely manner, and drive the greatest impact. You take initiative, roll up your sleeves, and get things done.
• Caring: You genuinely care about yourself and others, our business and craft, our mission and vision, and are passionate in heart and mind. You understand the importance of our team and strive to create a positive, supportive work environment.
• Curious: You focus on the 'why,' learn and expand your knowledge, explore new ideas, and generally make things better. You're a lifelong learner with a thirst for knowledge and a constant desire to improve.
• Thorough: Your work is thoughtful, impactful, timely, accurate, and complete. You pay attention to detail, are meticulous, and ensure quality work and compliance.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional product management experience, including 4+ years independently owning a product or business line.
• Deep, demonstrated experience with consumer subscription products: pricing and packaging, trials, paywalls, churn and retention, and store billing on both iOS and Android.
• Hands-on experience with in-app advertising (IAA) monetization across rewarded video, interstitials, and native placements, including working knowledge of mediation platforms such as AppLovin MAX or Google AdMob and the metrics that govern them (eCPM, fill rate, ARPDAU, impressions per DAU).
• Demonstrated experience launching or operating a freemium or hybrid-monetization product, with a clear point of view on where the free/paid line belongs and how to avoid cannibalizing subscription revenue.
• Proven experience managing products with P&L accountability and delivering measurable business outcomes.
• Experience in mobile app ecosystems (utility, privacy/security, productivity, or rewards/monetization) at meaningful scale.
• Hands-on experience designing and interpreting A/B experiments, with the discipline to kill your own ideas.
• Strong analytical skills and proficiency with product analytics tools such as Mixpanel or Amplitude, plus spreadsheets and business performance dashboards.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, capable of influencing at the executive level.

Strongly Preferred

Experience with a consumer product where connectivity and performance are the core of the value proposition: VPN, messaging or VoIP, browsers, security and antivirus, or cloud backup and sync. These products share a set of problems most consumer apps never encounter. Performance varies with network conditions and hardware, server and geo strategy is a product decision rather than an infrastructure one, onboarding depends on permissions users are reluctant to grant, and the user base evaluates you almost entirely on whether the product works every time they open it.

You would be the first person at Mode.Inc to have run a product in this family, so prior time in the category compounds quickly. You would arrive with informed instincts on questions that otherwise take two quarters of experimentation to answer. This is not a requirement, and we will hire an exceptional generalist over a category specialist who lacks the monetization depth, but it is the single strongest accelerant available for this role.

Nice to Have

• Familiarity with subscription infrastructure such as RevenueCat, Superwall, Adapty, Apphud, or Stripe billing.
• Experience integrating or scaling a product post-acquisition, or operating in a multi-app portfolio.
• Working knowledge of auto-renewal and consumer-protection requirements across app stores and US federal and state law.
• Experience with emerging-market user bases and the constraints of budget Android hardware.

Why This Role Matters

This is one of Mode.Inc's most significant acquisitions and the first product in a new business unit. It arrives profitable, well-reviewed, and with a large installed base, and it has been run as a single-model subscription business for its entire life. Nobody has yet asked what it could be with a free tier in front of it, a modern paywall behind it, and a real experimentation program running through the middle.

That is what you are here to find out. The subscription business gives you a durable revenue base to build from. The free tier gives you a genuinely new business to create, backed by Mode.Inc's ad monetization expertise, mediation relationships, and UA firepower. The app has never had access to any of that.

You will have the GM's direct support, a dedicated engineering team, and the full weight of Mode.Inc's monetization, UA, data, and support functions. You will also have unusual latitude: no incumbent roadmap to defend, and no legacy consensus to unwind.

Do this well and you will have taken a strong single-model business and turned it into a multi-model one, with your fingerprints on the playbook Mode.Inc applies to every communications app that follows. Bring ambition. Bring curiosity. Bring energy. Everything else we can iterate.

We Believe In The Following Workplace Norms

• Allow OKRs to Guide Us
• Assume Positive Intent
• Agree to Disagree & Commit
• Set New Precedents
• Accomplish More with Less
• Hold Yourself & Others to High Standards
• Speak Up
• Be Resourceful
• Follow the 80/20 Rule

What We Are Offering

• We are a 100% remote-first, global company.
• A competitive compensation package.
• We offer generous perks & benefits to team members. 
• Participation in the Company's equity and token plan (for full-time team members).
• We provide individual bonuses in accordance with our Company Bonus Program.
• Work with energetic, passionate, and results-driven people.
• Celebrate team members' personal & work milestones.
• Remote social activities, including virtual coffee buddies. 
• Bonus.ly - we use Bonusly as a way to recognize and reward team members for their hard work and commitment.
• Weekly Wednesday Get Stuff Done Days (No Meetings).
• Open PTO and generous Company Holidays (for full-time team members).
• 5 annual Wellness Fridays.

If we just described you and your perfect role, we'd love to talk with you.  We have a lot to accomplish this year and look forward to making headway and creating success together!

Mode.Inc does not accept/pay fees for unsolicited resumes from third-party agencies/vendors.

Our company is an Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) employer. We are committed to providing a work environment free of discrimination and harassment. All employment decisions are made without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. We celebrate diversity and strive to create an inclusive environment for all team members.