Gameberry Labs - Lead Product Manager - Game Design

About The Role

We're building a new game engine, and this role owns it. It exists to do something structurally different from what made us successful so far: instead of deepening one enduring title, it puts many concepts into the market quickly, reads the signal honestly, and doubles down only on what earns it. We run this as a factory, not a series of bets. Concepts move through a staged funnel: creative signal, then install economics, then engagement, then ROAS, and most of them die at a stage. That is the point. The ones that survive get built into hybrid-casual titles: ads-led at the core, with a meta layer engineered to carry IAP as the game matures. You'll own that engine end to end.

Responsibilities

• Vision: Set the thesis for what we build and why. Decide which mechanics, genres, and audiences we chase this quarter and which we deliberately ignore. Turn market signals, competitive intel, store movement, creative trends, and UA data into a portfolio strategy leadership can back.
• Product: Own the full lifecycle on titles in the pipeline: concept, prototype, soft launch, and scale. Write the specs, design the core loop and progression, define the economy, and shape the meta layer that takes a title from ad-monetized to hybrid.
• Production: Own throughput. Small pods, tight cadence, and external partners where it makes sense. You are accountable for how many concepts reach the test, how fast they get there, and what each one costs us to learn from. Judgment. Run the kill/scale calls. Defend them with data, own them when they're wrong, and keep the bar honest when a concept everyone loves isn't clearing its numbers.
• People: Mentor and grow the product and game designers working across the pipeline. Build the practice, not just the product.
• Own the product vision, roadmap, and portfolio strategy for Gameberry's hybrid-casual line.
• Drive concepts through the full lifecycle, writing specifications and working across design, art, engineering, and UA to ship playable builds fast.
• Define and defend the metrics that gate each stage of the testing funnel, and make the kill/scale decision at every gate.
• Design core loops, progression systems, economies, and the meta layer that carries a title from IAA-led to hybrid monetization.
• Partner closely with UA and creative teams in this genre; creative is product, and the two cannot be sequenced.
• Own production planning, team allocation, and delivery cadence across multiple concepts running in parallel.
• Present strategy, results, and honest post-mortems to founders and senior leadership.
• Mentor and guide product and game designers; raise the analytical and craft bar across the pod.
• Build the operating system playbooks, scorecards, and benchmarks so the pipeline gets better with every cycle, not just busier.

Requirements

• 8+ years in product management, with meaningful time in game development. A hybrid-casual, hypercasual, or casual puzzle experience is a strong plus.
• Demonstrated ownership of a title from concept to launch, ideally more than one, ideally including one that didn't work.
• Fluency in the economics of the genre: CPI, IPM, D1/D7 retention, ARPDAU, LTV, and payback. You should be able to read a ROAS curve and say something useful about it without an analyst in the room.
• Strong grasp of ad monetization and how an IAP meta layer is built on top of it.
• Ability to create wireframes, product specifications, and system designs that engineers and artists can build from without a translation layer.
• Strong project management skills and the ability to present work to executive staff.
• Comfort with ambiguity and speed. This is a zero-to-one function; the process is partly yours to invent.
• Self-starter with a bias for action and a genuine love for solving unsolved problems.
• Previous start-up or studio-building experience is a strong plus.
• Working knowledge of AI tooling in the production pipeline is a plus; we're actively building this into how the team operates.

(ref:hirist.tech)