Product Lead — for a AI - Social Networking App

About Shopinion

Shopinion Inc. is building a trusted shopping intelligence and social commerce platform where people make better purchase decisions through friends, verified purchase history, merchant rewards, and AI.

Our core belief is simple: people trust friends more than advertisements, anonymous reviews, and generic recommendations.

Shopinion is designed to help consumers organize purchases, ask trusted friends for advice, discover products through people they know, control what they share, and earn merchant-funded discounts. For merchants, Shopinion turns authentic peer influence into measurable customer acquisition and repeat business.

We are an early-stage Delaware corporation that raised a pre-seed round and is getting ready to launch the App and raise a seed round.

The Role

We are seeking a hands-on Founding Product Lead to work directly with the CEO and Founder and lead the continued design and development of the Shopinion mobile application.

You will turn the founder’s vision and existing product concepts into a focused, buildable product. You will connect strategy, UX/UI, engineering, QA, user research, and delivery.

This is not a strategy-only product management position. You must be comfortable working in Figma, writing detailed requirements, reviewing product flows, answering developer questions, testing releases, and challenging unnecessary complexity.

What You Will Own

Define and maintain the MVP scope, roadmap, priorities, and product backlog.
Convert product concepts into PRDs, user stories, acceptance criteria, business rules, and engineering tickets.
Design and improve shopper, friend, merchant, and administrator user journeys.
Work with designers in Figma to review screens, navigation, copy, states, and interaction behavior.
Coordinate product decisions across mobile, backend, AI, merchant tools, privacy, analytics, and QA.
Review engineering estimates and make practical scope and sequencing decisions.
Conduct user interviews, prototype tests, and merchant validation.
Ensure privacy, consent, visibility, and sensitive-data requirements are included in every relevant feature.
Maintain clear documentation of decisions, risks, open questions, and approved changes.
Lead regular product reviews with the CEO, engineering, design, and QA teams.
Initial Product Areas

Your initial priorities will be to:

Audit the current product documentation, designs, backlog, and MVP implementation.
Identify missing requirements, inconsistent flows, design gaps, and delivery risks.
Recommend a clear must-have, should-have, and later MVP scope.
Convert approved features into engineering-ready requirements and tickets.
Improve the main consumer, merchant, and administrator journeys.
Establish a reliable operating workflow across the CEO, product, design, engineering, and QA.
Create a structured plan for user and merchant validation.
Move Shopinion toward internal alpha and closed-pilot readiness.

Required Qualifications

Five or more years of relevant product management, product development, or product design experience.
Experience helping ship a consumer mobile application.
Strong ability to simplify broad ideas into focused, buildable product requirements.
Excellent PRD, user-story, acceptance-criteria, and documentation skills.
Strong understanding of mobile UX, onboarding, navigation, and interaction design.
Practical experience with Figma or comparable design tools.
Experience working closely with mobile, backend, API, and QA engineers.
Ability to understand technical tradeoffs and communicate clearly with developers.
Experience with user research, usability testing, analytics, or product experiments.
Full-time availability and reliable overlap with U.S. Central Time.
Preferred Experience

Experience in one or more of the following is strongly preferred:

Social networking or social commerce.
Consumer AI or AI-assisted products.
Marketplaces, e-commerce, loyalty, rewards, or referrals.
Privacy controls and permission-based product experiences.
React Native, Expo, TypeScript, Node.js, Postgres, or related technologies.
Early-stage, founder-led, pre-product-market-fit startups.

Technical prototyping or coding ability is valuable, but the primary responsibility is product leadership, UX definition, and execution.

Who Will Succeed in This Role

You should be comfortable with early-stage ambiguity but disciplined about scope and documentation. You should be able to move between strategy, UX details, technical discussions, user feedback, and delivery execution.

You must also be willing to challenge the founder constructively when a feature is too complex, expensive, risky, or unsupported by evidence.

Engagement and Compensation

Commitment: Full-time.
Initial engagement: Six-month independent contractor agreement.
Cash compensation: Negotiated monthly contractor fee based on experience and availability.
Equity: Meaningful stock-option or equity opportunity based on seniority, contribution, and long-term fit.
Reporting: Directly to the CEO and Founder.
Location: Remote, with dependable U.S. Central Time overlap.
Long-term opportunity: The engagement may develop into an ongoing product leadership role based on performance, funding, company needs, and mutual agreement.