Principal Product Manager, GQ & Pitchfork

Job Description

Location:

About the Role

Condé Nast is looking for a Principal Product Manager to lead digital product for two of the most culturally iconic brands in media — GQ, the definitive voice in men's style, culture, and identity, and Pitchfork, the standard-bearer for music criticism and discovery.

This is a principal-level role. You won't just execute a roadmap — you'll own the product vision for both brands, set the standard for what great looks like, and be accountable for outcomes across two of the most distinct editorial cultures in digital media. You'll influence engineering, editorial, commercial, and senior leadership, and you'll move the organisation through the quality of your thinking and the clarity of your decisions.

GQ and Pitchfork share almost nothing except the standard they set. Different audiences, different business models, different editorial cultures, different product priorities. You'll own both simultaneously, and the best person for this role doesn't just manage that complexity, they're genuinely energised by it.

This isn't a role for someone who manages a backlog. It's a role for someone who reads both mastheads religiously, has strong opinions about the products, and wants to shape what it means to experience these brands digitally - with experimentation, prototyping, and data at the centre of how they work.

You are AI-native - not curious about AI, but already building with it. You bring that lens to every product decision, and you move fast: from idea to prototype to test to ship.

What You'll Own

Product Vision & Brand Stewardship

• Own the product strategy and roadmap for GQ and Pitchfork's digital experiences — web, and whatever comes next.

• Develop a deep, specific point of view on what makes each brand's product exceptional: GQ's intersection of style, culture, and commerce; Pitchfork's role in how music fans discover, contextualise, and obsess over music.

• Protect and extend what makes these brands irreplaceable while pushing their digital experiences into genuinely new territory.

• Pitchfork's paywall launched in early 2026 — you'll inherit it, interrogate it, and own what comes next. That means developing a sharp, evidence-based point of view on how to grow a subscriber base without eroding the cultural reach that makes Pitchfork worth subscribing to in the first place.

• GQ has built decades of authority over how men think about style, culture, and what to buy. The product opportunity is realising that commercially — building shopping and discovery experiences worthy of that trust, and measuring what it actually takes to convert a reader into a buyer.

Experimentation & Product Analytics

• Own the experimentation programme for both brands — design, run, and analyse A/B and multivariate tests across the full digital experience.

• Define the metrics that matter: engagement depth, retention, conversion, content interaction, and brand-specific KPIs that reflect the unique audience of each masthead.

• Build a culture of hypothesis-driven development — every major product decision is grounded in data and validated through structured testing.

• Self-sufficient when it comes to pulling your own data, interpreting it, and setting up your own dashboards and instrumentation when needed.

• Translate quantitative signals and qualitative user research into clear product direction; communicate findings compellingly to editorial and senior stakeholders.

Prototyping & AI-Powered Experiences

• Prototype first — use low- and high-fidelity prototypes to pressure-test ideas before committing engineering resources.

• Leverage AI tools to accelerate prototyping and unlock experiences that weren't previously possible: personalised editorial surfaces, AI-assisted style recommendations, music discovery features, smart search, and beyond.

• Stay at the frontier of what AI makes possible in media and bring informed, practical perspectives on what to build, buy, or partner on.

• Bias hard toward learning quickly — ship iteratively, measure relentlessly, improve continuously.

Editorial Partnership

• Build genuine, trust-based partnerships with GQ and Pitchfork's editorial teams — understand their creative process, respect their craft, and find where product can amplify their work without diluting it.

• Serve as the bridge between editorial vision and technical possibility, translating fluently in both directions.

• Co-develop product experiences that feel native to each brand's voice and sensibility — a GQ feature should feel like GQ; a Pitchfork experience should feel like Pitchfork.

Prioritisation & Delivery

• Drive product prioritisation within a 12 month horizon, balancing near-term delivery with longer-term bets.

• Lead cross-functional teams across editorial, design, engineering, and project management to ship products that move the needle.

• Convert business objectives into clear development plans and follow through on delivery.

• Define and refine OKRs for your product area; manage agile ceremonies and day-to-day planning.

Stakeholder Communication

• Align senior stakeholders to the product roadmap; communicate updates, blockers, and decisions proactively and clearly.

• Write sharp product briefs and gain buy-in on new approaches.

• Own all product documentation — strategy, status, and decisions.

What We're Looking For

• 10+ years of product management experience in digital media, publishing, or consumer-facing products — with a track record of shipping great web experiences, not just managing roadmaps. You can point to specific things you built, what they moved, and what you learned.

• A genuine fan of GQ and Pitchfork — you read them, you have opinions about them, you understand what makes each brand's voice and audience distinct.

• You know what best-in-class looks like for a consumer content experience and you hold your team to that standard. You benchmark against the best publishers and platforms — not just direct competitors — and you bring that context into every product conversation.

• Business-minded — you can size a market, write a business case, and hold your own in a commercial conversation. You understand how product decisions connect to revenue, audience growth, and long-term brand value, and you can articulate that clearly to senior stakeholders.

• Experimentation fluency — you've owned or deeply contributed to A/B testing programmes; you know how to design valid tests, interpret results, and drive decisions from data.

• Strong product analytics chops — comfortable with data tracking tools, funnel analysis, cohort analysis, and building the instrumentation that makes good measurement possible.

• A prototyper's instinct — you move fast from concept to artifact; you've used Figma, no-code tools, AI tools, or whatever it takes to make ideas tangible quickly.

• AI-native orientation — you already use AI in your daily work, you've shipped or contributed to AI-powered features, and you think of AI as a core capability, not an add-on.

• Experience with men's lifestyle, fashion, culture, or music products — you understand what great looks like in these spaces and have strong opinions about the gap between what exists and what could.

• Editorial partnership experience — you know how to earn trust with editors, navigate creative culture, and build products that feel editorially authentic.

• Comfort with ambiguity — you've operated in large, complex organisations where the path wasn't always clear. You've driven alignment without direct authority, across teams with competing priorities, and you've kept things moving anyway.

• You make the people around you better — whether that's a junior PM, a designer, or an engineering partner, you raise the standard of the work without being asked to.

• Comfort operating within a shared platform model — you've built on centralised infrastructure before, you know how to move fast within constraints, and you know how to influence platform and engineering teams to prioritise your needs without owning the roadmap yourself.

• Strong written and verbal communication skills; comfort working across time zones and functions.

• Bachelor's or Master's degree.

• Bonus: experience at a media or publishing company — you already know the rhythms of editorial culture and publishing.

The expected base salary range for this position is from $185,000-215,000. Salary offers are based on a wide range of factors including but not limited to relevant skills, training, experience, and education.

What happens next?

If you are interested in this opportunity, please apply below, and we will review your application as soon as possible. You can update your resume or upload a cover letter at any time by accessing your candidate profile.

Condé Nast is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, age, familial status and other legally protected characteristics.