Product Manager

About Returning.AI Think Discord, spin-the-wheel, lucky draws, streaks, and leaderboards - but built for financial institutions. At Returning.AI, we build gamified loyalty and retention systems for CFD brokerages. Our clients are enterprise, paying $60-144K per year. We are a small 10-15 person team HQ-ed in Singapore, profitable, and growing fast.

Our product lives inside a broker's client portals and drives trader engagement through rewards, challenges, and lifecycle campaigns. That means real integrations, real operational complexity, and real commercial stakes. This is not generic SaaS. It is niche, fast-moving, and execution-sensitive. We are not looking for someone to "manage product" from a distance.

We need someone who can work closely with the founder, absorb chaos, create structure fast, and help move the team forward. Why this role exists Right now, too much of the product loop still sits with the founder. That means turning half-formed ideas into something buildable. Keeping design and engineering aligned. Pressure-testing requirements. Spotting gaps before they become rework.

Helping the team find a workable path when the clean answer does not exist yet. That does not scale. We need someone who can take that load off. Someone who can think clearly in messy situations, communicate well across functions, use AI heavily, and go from raw idea to clear action without waiting for perfect structure first. What you will actually do Run the day-to-day product operating loop.

You will help keep design, engineering, QA, and founder priorities aligned. You should know what is in motion, what is blocked, what is unclear, and what needs to happen next. Turn messy inputs into buildable work.

Founder ideas, client requests, internal discussions, rough sketches, scattered Slack threads, half-made decisions. Your job is to turn that into clear briefs, specs, priorities, edge cases, and next steps. Prototype directly.

You should be comfortable using tools like Codex, Claude Code, or similar to mock flows, pressure-test ideas, build lightweight internal tools, and validate whether something is feasible before it eats engineering time. Read docs and figure things out.

You should be able to read API documentation, inspect payloads, understand auth flows, test endpoints, and work out how systems fit together. You do not need to be a full-time engineer, but you do need to be technically dangerous enough to reduce ambiguity rather than add to it. Bridge product and engineering.

You should be able to speak to engineers in a concrete, useful way while keeping business intent intact. If a requirement is vague, broken, duplicated, or not worth building, you should catch that early. Use AI as a default working tool.

We expect AI to be part of how you think, write, analyse, prototype, research, structure, and solve problems. This is not a role for someone who occasionally uses ChatGPT. We want someone who leans on AI constantly to increase output and compress feedback loops. Solve creatively under imperfect conditions.

Sometimes the product is raw. Sometimes the clean system does not exist yet. Sometimes the client need is valid but the current product shape is not ready for it. You need enough judgment to find a workable path forward without creating unnecessary complexity. Own follow-through.

• Things should not die in someone's head, a call recording, or a Slack thread.
• You should be the person who makes sure important decisions turn into clear action.
• Must haves
• Singaporean or PR
• Degree in Computer Science, Business, Entrepreneurship, or a related field
• Real exposure to AI tools such as Claude Code, Codex, LLM workflows, or similar
• Strong written and verbal communication
• Enough technical comfort to read docs, follow API flows, and wire simple things up
• What good looks like in this role
• The founder no longer has to personally manage every moving part to keep the product team running
• Designers and engineers get clearer briefs, better context, and fewer avoidable misunderstandings
• Product decisions happen faster because tradeoffs and blockers surface earlier
• More work gets shipped with less confusion and less rework
• The team moves faster without becoming process-heavy
• AI meaningfully improves the speed and quality of execution instead of just being talked about
• Who we are looking for Strong communicator.

Written and verbal. You can explain a technical constraint clearly, summarise messy discussions into usable next steps, and reduce confusion rather than create it. AI-native in practice.

You already use tools like Codex, Claude Code, Cursor, ChatGPT, or similar as part of your real workflow. Not as a gimmick. As an actual operating layer. If you cannot show how AI materially changes how you work, this is not the role. Technically comfortable.

You do not need to be a senior engineer, but you should be comfortable reading API docs, understanding JSON, tracing request flows, reasoning about data shape, and wiring simple things together. You should not freeze when technical conversations get specific. Product-minded.

You can decide what the smallest useful version is, push back when something does not make sense, and keep business value tied to execution. High agency.

If something is missing, unclear, blocked, or drifting, you do not wait passively. You dig, clarify, prototype, escalate, or resolve. Good under ambiguity.

This role is not for someone who needs every task fully scoped before they can contribute. You should be comfortable walking into a half-formed situation and helping create the structure it needs. Creative but grounded.

• We want someone who can piece concepts together, spot non-obvious solutions, and think laterally, while still being practical about tradeoffs, speed, and what the team can actually execute.
• What this role is not
• Not a traditional PM role built around ceremonies and status reporting
• Not a project coordinator role whose main job is chasing updates
• Not an AI strategy or LLM product role
• Not a pure engineer role
• Not the right fit for someone who wants neat requirements, low ambiguity, and clear swim lanes before starting
• Strong signals
• You have worked in a startup or founder-led environment where priorities moved fast and context was messy
• You have translated vague business ideas into shipped product or working prototypes
• You are already hands-on with AI-assisted workflows and can show how you use them
• You can read docs, test things yourself, and narrow ambiguity before handing work off
• You write clearly, think clearly, and make teams faster Weak signals
• You mainly talk about frameworks, rituals, and stakeholder management
• You need polished tickets before you can be useful
• You avoid technical detail and prefer to stay at a high level
• You say you are "into AI" but cannot show how it changes your actual workflow
• You create process as a substitute for judgment
• What you get
• Direct founder access and real ownership
• A role that cuts across product, design, engineering, and execution
• A team that already uses AI heavily and expects you to do the same
• Real enterprise clients and real production constraints, not toy product work
• A chance to shape how a small, high-output product team actually runs

How to apply

• If you made it this far, send an email to desmond[@]returning.ai and you will get a confirmed response.
• Include:
• 1. Why product management is the path you want
• 2. How you would rate your people skills, honestly
• 3. Your MBTI, if you have done one
• 4. What AI tools you have used and how deep you have gone with them
• 5. One example of something messy you turned into a clear outcome We will respond to every serious application.
• No ghosting.