Gamification Product Manager

CreditBooster.ai’s mission is to help every American understand, build, and own their credit. We’re an AI-native credit platform, live on the App Store and Google Play, with real paying customers and a small remote team across the US and Europe. Our users work on improving their credit, learn how credit actually works, and find credit products matched to their profile. We grew 2,211% in six months. The problem you’d own Credit improvement has the slowest feedback loop in consumer fintech. Improving a credit score is a long journey, and it moves in long cycles. Reports refresh once a month. Real change takes many months more. Between those moments a user’s score does not move and nothing visible happens. Every product in this category inherits that silence. Most of them fill it with noise, or with numbers they cannot stand behind. We would rather fill it with something true, and that is the design problem you would own. The second half of it is comprehension. Credit is genuinely confusing, and most people arrive without a clear model of how it works or what to do first. Building that understanding, and making it feel like real movement long before the outcome arrives, is as much of this role as the mechanics are. Your job is to design the system that fills that gap: a motivation and education layer that makes a 30-day wait feel like forward movement, without ever lying to the user about their score. That last clause is the hard part, and it’s why this role needs a specialist. We operate under CROA and app-store rules. We cannot promise a score outcome, we cannot imply a guaranteed result, and we cannot reward users for taking on debt. Every mechanic you design has to create genuine momentum inside those constraints. If you’ve only ever gamified things where you could dangle the outcome, this will be a harder and more interesting problem than you’re used to. Where you might come from We’re as interested in game designers as in product people. If you’ve built progression systems, quest structures, meta systems, or in-game economies, and you want to point that craft at something that changes a person’s financial life rather than their score in a match, this is that job. The discipline transfers. The subject matter is what changes. To be direct about one thing: this is not an iGaming or casino retention role, and that experience is not what we’re looking for. Bonus mechanics, lootboxes, and win-back offers are the opposite of the playbook here. What you’d own You’d work alongside our product manager. The engagement model. Define the progression system end to end: what counts as progress between report pulls, how it’s earned, how it’s shown, what it unlocks. We have an internal brainstorm covering XP, credit-health levels, streaks, and quest-framed progress. Treat it as raw material to argue with, not a spec to implement. Notifications and lifecycle messaging. Our push and email today are functional and forgettable. We want a messaging system built on a metaphor a user can hold in their head, delivered on a cadence that earns attention instead of burning it. First-run and education. Design what a new user sees in their first ten minutes and their first month. This is the single biggest lever we have on how a new user starts. The retention instrument panel. Decide what we measure, instrument it with our PM and engineers, and hold yourself to it. You should be able to say which mechanic moved which cohort, and kill the ones that didn’t. Experiment design. Set up the tests, call them honestly, and write down what we learned. We have PostHog, Amplitude, and RevenueCat in place. What we’re looking for You’ve shipped a real system that survived contact with users. Progression, levels, quests, missions, streaks, meta systems, in-game economies, habit loops. In a game or in a product, it doesn’t matter which, as long as it went live and you can talk about what it changed using numbers. Not a case study, not a concept deck. You can write the document. A GDD, a systems spec, an engagement model, whatever your discipline calls it. You define the rules, the balance, and what the system refuses to do, clearly enough that designers and engineers can build from it. You reason from behavioral science, not from a pattern library. Self-determination theory, the Fogg behavior model, variable reward, loss aversion, the difference between a habit and a compulsion. You can explain why a mechanic works, and you can tell when the honest version of it is weaker than the manipulative version and choose the honest one anyway. You are comfortable being the person who says no. Half of good gamification is deleting mechanics. Points for their own sake, leaderboards that shame people, streaks that punish a missed day during a hard month. You’ve killed features like these before and you can explain why. You work in the constraint, not around it. Regulated, compliance-bound, or safety-critical product experience is a strong signal. Health, education, finance, insurance. You’re hands-on. We’re a small team. You will write the specs, sit with the designers in Figma, brief the engineers, read the dashboards, and argue with the CEO. There is no team under you and no one to delegate to. You may be a good fit if you have 4+ years in game design, product design, behavioral design, or learning design, with at least 2 owning a progression, economy, or engagement system end to end Evidence a system you built changed how people behaved, and the honesty to also describe something you shipped that didn’t work Fluency with analytics and experimentation tooling, and the confidence to design a test that can actually fail A plus, not a requirement: experience at a company known for doing this well, such as Duolingo, SoFi, Noom, Headspace, Chime, Credit Karma, Peloton, Babbel, or Strava, or on a live game with real progression and economy systems Working English at C1 or above. Our team speaks Russian and Ukrainian internally, but all product artifacts, tickets, and customer-facing copy are in English Nice to have Consumer subscription experience, especially where the value takes weeks to arrive. Formal background in psychology, behavioral economics, or instructional design. Game design or live-ops experience. Experience in credit, lending, or another product where the user’s outcome is partly out of the product’s control. How we work Fully remote. You’ll need overlap with Chicago mornings, roughly 8 to 11am CT, for standups and demos. We’re open to full-time and to a focused fractional engagement if that’s how you work best. Tell us which you want and we’ll talk. How to apply Send us one system you shipped. Tell us what it was supposed to change, what it actually changed, and one mechanic you removed and why. First step is a 30-minute conversation. No take-home before that.