Product Manager (Expertise / PKM App)

About this role

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.

The Role

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.

What you will be doing

• 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.

What you will NOT be doing

• 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.

What this looks like in practice

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 feature that nudges students from collecting facts to taking a stance. By Friday engineering has a working reference.

Friday shipping review. You know which of this week's changes students actually used and which one nobody touched. You cut two things from next week because they don't make anyone more of an expert, and add one that does.

The three things that matter most

1. Students become real experts. A student who uses the app for a year should know their domain better than most adults in it, and be able to prove it.
2. The app ships fast and plays well with the rest of our software. Weekly cadence, clean hand-offs, nothing breaking downstream.
3. Students actually want to use it. It's the tool they open on their own, not homework they put up with.

What this becomes

At 6 months, the Expertise App has a weekly shipping rhythm, you know every flow and drop-off, and students are building graphs with real points of view.

At 12 months, the Expertise App is a genuine strength of the program. The first cohort has built real expertise on it, and it's ready to scale to new campuses.

As Founders School grows to thousands of students, the Expertise App becomes its own product line, and possibly a product people outside the school want too. This seat grows into leading it.

Candidate requirements

• You are deeply immersed in personal knowledge management. You've used Roam, Notion, Obsidian, or similar tools seriously for years, and you know Tiago Forte's work and the wider PKM canon inside and out.
• You are an AI-native builder. You ship working software with AI as your leverage. Non-negotiable.
• You have shipped real software that real people used, as a founder, an engineer, or a PM who genuinely built.
• You write working code. You don't need to be a career software engineer, but you can prototype independently and hold your own with engineers.
• You care about how people learn, and you can design for teenagers without dumbing anything down.
• You are willing to work on-site (relocation support provided) and are legally authorized to work in the United States.

Nice to have

• You've built a PKM tool, plugin, template, or course that other people use.
• A public second brain, digital garden, or body of writing that shows how you think.
• Experience building consumer or education software where usage data is unforgiving.
• Experience working with or building for young people.

What we explicitly don't need

• A career PM who has never built anything and manages through process.
• Someone who's never had a note-taking obsession. If you don't have opinions about PKM, this isn't your role.
• A K-12 education background. We're actively biased against it.
• Anyone who needs to be remote. There is no remote version of this role.

If you've spent years building your own second brain and want to build the one that turns high schoolers into experts, apply now.