Product Manager, Vancouver

Product Manager

Elective | Vancouver, BC

Elective is a Vancouver-based Series A fintech that builds the lending infrastructure for the online education industry: flexible payment options at checkout for courses, coaching programs, and digital learning communities, with Elective carrying the risk. The company is five years old, founder-led, and profitable.

To date, Elective has supported over 100,000 customers funding their education across North America, all underwritten, funded, and serviced through a platform Elective built from the ground up.

The company is now investing in dedicated product leadership for the first time, leaning on five years of accumulated knowledge about what Elective is and what it needs to do next. This is the first Product Manager seat at the company. You're not joining a product org to optimize it. You're building one from the ground up, on top of a profitable platform that has already served 100,000+ customers. The person in this role partners directly with the CEO to shape product strategy, owns end-to-end execution across the platform, and helps drive the next phase of growth.

This is a foundational hire. You'll help define what product looks like at Elective - the cadence, the standards, the operating system. The role grows as the function does, with a clear path to senior product leadership for the operator who builds it well.

The person who thrives here is energized by genuine ownership of a wide product surface, by methodical execution in direct partnership with the CEO, and by building systems that compound over time rather than relying on headcount to scale.

What you'll be doing

• Translating company strategy into a sequenced roadmap. You'll partner with the CEO on direction and own how it ships - sequencing, scope, and tradeoffs. Maintain a rolling 3-6 month view: next 5 initiatives defined, the 5 after shaped, beyond that directional.
• Building the product operating system. Intake, prioritization, discovery, delivery, and review rituals that fit Elective's launch cadence. Tracking commitments and surfacing slippage early. Replacing tribal knowledge with documented systems, dashboards, and decision logs.
• Shaping projects engineers can build from independently. No ambiguity, no hand-waving. You define the what and why with enough clarity that one engineer ships the whole feature.
• Owning every tactical tradeoff. Scope vs. speed, feature vs. quality work, merchant ask vs. platform investment. You'll make the call and defend it. You escalate the few that genuinely need CEO involvement.
• Running our Voice of the Customer program. Regular merchant interviews and weekly reviews of customer feedback across tickets, sessions, and other channels. Synthesizing it into structured signal, not anecdotes
• Defining and tracking KPIs for every initiative. Pulling your own analytics. Measuring outcomes, not outputs.
• Making go-to-market part of done. You'll build the documentation, internal guides, and change-management mechanics that get finance, customer care, risk, and compliance ready before launch - not after.
• Operating compliant by design. Every feature clears the bar of a regulated financial services business in the US and Canada.

What you bring

• 3-5+ years in product, or former founder experience with a track record of shipping a product end-to-end. Either profile works if you've owned execution at a small or growth-stage company.
• Systems thinking. You walk into a messy product org and map the underlying flow - how requests enter, how decisions get made, how work gets prioritized, how outcomes get measured. You design lightweight rituals and build decision logs so product memory survives turnover. This is the muscle that takes Elective from founder-led product to repeatable product machine.
• Methodical and organized. You set the operating cadence for the team and run it cleanly. You build repeatable mechanisms instead of one-off fixes.
• Sharp judgement on tradeoffs. You make the hard calls - what to cut, what to defer, what to say no to - push back on scope creep, and keep the team focused on the core. You can defend every call with clear rationale, not just instinct.
• Strong written communication. You can produce decision docs and PRDs that reduce meetings rather than create them.
• Discovery discipline. You've run user research that changed what got built.
• Self-sufficient with data. You pull your own analytics, define your own metrics, and design experiments without waiting for someone else to build the dashboard.
• Commercial instinct. You connect product decisions to the business model and understand what drives retention and expansion.
• Technical fluency. You do not hide behind "that's an engineering question." You understand systems well enough to push back on engineering trade-offs and have productive conversations about architecture.
• Operator mindset. You treat Customer Care, Risk, Finance, Compliance, and Engineering as customers of the product function - not obstacles to ship around.
• Hands-on with modern AI tools. You've formed opinions about how you work best with them and use them to prototype, communicate, and accelerate your output.
• Comfort in ambiguity. You ramp through doing, not through being taught. You bring the answer to the room, not the question.
• Domain experience in fintech, payroll, legal tech, or another regulated environment is a nice-to-have, not a must-have. Adaptability matters more.

The details

Compensation: $120K-$135K base, up to 10% bonus.

Location: Vancouver, BC. Hybrid, minimum three days per week in office.

Reporting line: Co-Founder and CEO