Product Manager, Growth - Lifecycle

As a Product Manager, Growth - Lifecycle at Cantina Labs, you own how the platform reaches users outside the app and brings them back to value inside it. Sitting on the product management team, you'll own the end-to-end user journey across email, push, and in-product messaging, including the deep-linked landing and post-click experiences that complete the loop. You'll develop a deep qualitative and quantitative understanding of how people move through Cantina, turn that into a lifecycle strategy that grows activation, retention, and resurrection, and partner with Data and Engineering to launch, measure, and compound improvements. This is a hands-on role with company-wide visibility where you'll write the strategy, ship the journeys, run the experiments, and bring senior stakeholders along.

What you'll do

• Own the lifecycle strategy and roadmap for Cantina's owned channels, mapping journeys across onboarding, activation, continuation, retention, resurrection, and monetization.
• Lead the design, launch, iteration, and optimization of templates and journeys across email, push, and in-product messaging, including the deep-linked landing and post-click product experiences that complete the loop.
• Optimize the lifecycle portfolio, not just individual sends: improve message inventory, relevance, personalization, prioritization, and per-user frequency so users get fewer, better-timed messages.
• Build a deep, evidence-based picture of the user journey by combining product analytics, cohort and funnel analysis with qualitative signals like session reviews, support themes, and user research to find where users stall and what would move them.
• Design and run experiments such as A/B tests, holdouts, and incrementality reads, holding the bar on measurement around retained activity and incremental value, not opens and clicks.
• Partner with the Data team to build the measurement system behind lifecycle: instrumentation, eligibility and audience definitions, dashboards, and experiment readouts.
• Partner with Engineering to ship campaigns end to end, including triggers, personalization payloads, deep links, and the in-product surfaces each journey lands on.
• Define the operating model with intake, templates, approvals, QA, and quality standards so lifecycle scales across teams without channel chaos or user fatigue.
• Set and communicate strategy to senior stakeholders, translating a messy portfolio into a clear multi-quarter direction and defending tradeoffs with data.

What you bring

• 6+ years in product management, growth, lifecycle/CRM, or retention, ideally in a consumer mobile or AI product operating at scale.
• Demonstrated ownership of lifecycle or engagement programs that moved a real business metric such as activation, D30 retention, resurrection, or conversion, with the analysis to prove it.
• Strong quantitative fluency: comfortable writing your own SQL and working in a BI/analytics tool like Mixpanel, Amplitude, Hex, or Looker to build funnels, cohorts, and retention curves without waiting on a queue.
• Hands-on experience with a lifecycle/CRM platform such as Braze, Iterable, or Customer.io, including segmentation, triggered canvases, personalization, and deliverability.
• Rigorous experimentation judgment: you understand holdouts, incrementality, sample sizing, and the difference between a delivery metric and a value metric.
• Technical and product fluency across event and identity models, APIs, deep linking, and push/email infrastructure, enough to design a system with Engineering. Coding is not required.
• Excellent written communication and cross-functional influence, with a track record of aligning senior stakeholders across Product, Engineering, Data, Design, and Marketing.
• Craft-level instinct for messaging: you can write the copy, critique the journey, and tell when a notification is helpful versus annoying.

Nice to have

• Experience with AI/consumer-social products.
• Localization or multi-market lifecycle experience.
• Building lifecycle tooling or self-service platforms with Engineering.

What we offer

• Annual base salary of $175,000-$250,000, plus generous company equity.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance with 99.99% of premiums covered by Cantina.
• 42 days of paid time off: 15 PTO days, 10 sick days, 15 company holidays, and 2 floating holidays.
• Generous parental leave and fertility support.
• 401(k) retirement savings plan.
• Lifestyle spending account of $500 per month.
• Complimentary lunch and snacks for in-office employees.
• One Medical membership.

About Cantina Labs

Cantina Labs is a social AI company developing a suite of advanced real-time models that push the boundaries of expression, personality, and realism. The flagship Cantina platform brings characters to life and transforms how people tell stories, connect, and create.