RevenueCat’s mission is to help developers make more money. Our CEO, Jacob, reminds us in every biweekly all-hands meeting that we do this by “building a winning team” and “shipping and selling stuff that helps developers make more money”. The latter, shipping stuff, is the remit of Engineering, Product & Design (EPD), and one of the three pillars of the winning team is our product management org. 

That product management team currently consists of six product managers, with several roles open and more to be hired over 2026. So I want to share a bit more about what it’s like to be a product manager (PM) at RevenueCat, what it takes to be a successful PM here, and what challenges we’re facing.

What makes the RevenueCat product special

There are many products you could work on as a product manager, from consumer products everybody knows (including your parents!) to niche products that baffle anyone not privy to the specific industry. RevenueCat definitely falls into the second category, but nonetheless, it’s a very special product. 

Obscure problems, meaningful impact

One of the defining features of RevenueCat is that we’re solving really complex, somewhat-arcane problems. Understanding what each field in an in-app purchase payload represents, what edge cases exist across Apple, Google, and Stripe, and how to best handle them is complicated and rarely glamorous. 

We often say we eat pain for a living — meaning, we solve painful infrastructure problems so developers don’t have to. That alone would make RevenueCat a complex product to work on. But what makes it meaningful is the reason behind all that work: we help app developers monetize their apps, because… 

  • We believe that more software is (when averaged out), a net good for the world
  • We believe that allowing people to create software and make a living from that is the best way to help humanity create more software

If you buy into these beliefs, then RevenueCat is a great product to work on, because the problems we solve help tens of thousands of developers monetize their apps.

Many of us at RevenueCat come from app backgrounds and/or still have indie apps on the app stores. We relate to the problems we solve and the value we bring to the industry, simply because we’ve been in the shoes of our customers. That makes us unique. 

A product loved by its customers

RevenueCat is a product with many fans. Not every customer is a fan, of course — some have legitimate gripes with the product, and for some it’s just a tool for their day-to-day work. But we have many customers who really love the product, because they see us enable them to get paid doing what they love: building apps.

Whether it’s meeting customers at conferences who seek our booth out to talk about the app, or people coming to App Growth Annual, it’s wonderful hearing people love the product you work on. We regularly see customers proudly post on social media about their first RevenueCat invoice — this means they’ve crossed the threshold of our free plan and are now making real money from their app. There aren’t many products customers are so happy to pay for!

This kind of feedback makes working on RevenueCat extremely rewarding, and also provides that motivation to help customers who run into issues. 

Aligned business-customer incentives

Speaking of first invoices, one of the best features about RevenueCat and its business model is how it aligns our incentives with those of our customers. We charge customers a percentage of their revenue. This means that when they grow, we grow. When they make money, we make money.

There is almost no purer business model. We want our customers to succeed because we will, too. Our incentives and the incentives of our customers are perfectly aligned. This makes decisions about the business viability of product choices much easier.

A few years ago, we decided to simplify our pricing structure so every customer gets access to all features, regardless of whether they’re on the free tier or an enterprise plan. We can do this because our revenue scales with our customers’ revenue anyway, so naturally, bigger customers will pay us more. We also believe that everyone should be able to benefit from the growth tools we provide. If we limited access to those tools to smaller developers on a cheaper plan, we would be limiting our own growth potential.

Different surface areas and challenges

The last distinct characteristic of the product that I want to highlight is the different surface areas we have; all of which come with their unique (technical) challenges.

  1. Backend: our backend is critical infrastructure for our customers. We need to prioritize reliability to ensure we don’t jeopardize our customers’ revenue streams, and we need the backend to be ultra-scalable. Our backend processes billions of API requests every day. Our most used API endpoints need to be fully cached or our database would be a smoldering wreck in an instant.
  2. SDKs and APIs: these need to be designed in a way that they remain stable for years to come, since developers will build their apps and backends relying on them. For the SDKs in particular, the quality bar is extremely high, because a buggy SDK that gets implemented by a developer could be out in the wild for a very long time if someone installs an app using that SDK and never updates it.
  3. Web dashboard: here we have a much higher degree of freedom to innovate and iterate quickly, and therefore deploy changes extremely rapidly.
  4. Consumer-facing UI: recently, we’ve shipped more and more consumer-facing UI: our paywalls, customer center, web checkout, and web customer portal are all used by our customers’ customers and therefore need a high degree of polish in order to inspire trust.

How we approach product management

Our approach to product management is shaped by our values as well as our talent vision. To best describe how product management at RevenueCat operates, you need to start with how we decide what to build. 

Deciding what to build

Every year, we decide on a product strategy. The product strategy determines the main focus areas for the coming year. In general, the yearly product strategy is an evolution of the one that came before it, rather than a revolution or radical pivot. The strategy is set at leadership level, and PMs provide critical input as it is being shaped.

In line with the strategy, we also revisit our team setup. We have relatively stable cross-functional teams where a PM works together with a team of engineers, reporting to an engineering manager (EM), as well as a designer.

The roadmap is mostly determined in our quarterly planning process. We’ve gone through a number of iterations of this process over the years. Currently, the process is as follows: 

Each team, represented by its PM, EM and designer, proposes a set of priorities for the team These are then reviewed and discussed with leadership (CEO, CTO, Head of Product). There can be some adjustments to the roadmap in these discussions, but by and large, the teams own their roadmap and prioritization. Product managers play a pivotal role in this process — often, they are the ones who have the most holistic view of their product area and the value that we can deliver to our customers through product improvements.

On a day-to-day and week-to-week basis, product managers work closely with their EM and designer counterparts, with at least weekly meetings and even more frequent interactions via async communication. The discovery and delivery of features in the team is owned by the whole team, and achieved through tight collaboration.

Living our values in product management

As mentioned, the other aspect that shapes our product management org is company values. These aren’t a list of values stuck in a Notion doc and forgotten about, they’re an ethos we actively work toward and measure ourselves against.

Customer obsession

At RevenueCat, we believe in focusing on delivering value to our customers above everything else. For our product management approach, this means several things:

  • PMs are expected to talk and interact with customers frequently: this includes 1:1 conversations and research calls, but also support tickets, social media posts, sales conversations, shared Slack channels with customers, conference booth chats, etc.
    • There is no barrier between PMs and customers: if a conversation is going to help you make a better product decision, just set it up
  • Customer anecdotes are often the most convincing way to argue for product decisions at RevenueCat. Of course, we don’t blindly build everything that customers ask for, but we try to find the underlying needs and problems. Generally, we believe that if a customer cares enough about the product to tell you their issues and unsolved problems, it’s wise to listen. 
  • Teams will be attentive to customer needs, regardless of problem scale — even the small issues that bug our customers. Our strategy is important, our roadmap is important, but if we can show a customer we care by quickly fixing a bug they encountered or removing a limitation they ran into, that will often make their day and turn doubters into fans (or fans into evangelists).

Always be shipping

Always be shipping impacts our approach to product management by pushing us to reduce the scope of whatever we are planning to the MVP version. There’s a couple reasons to do so: 

  1. It means delivering value to customers more quickly
  2. It allows us to get feedback and validation from customers as early as possible
Ship-or-dies

One way of forcing us to truly always be shipping and minimize scope is setting internal deadlines. The main mechanism we’ve established for this are quarterly, company-wide shipping goals (called our ‘ship-or-dies’). 

Designating an initiative a ship-or-die means we’ll do everything we can to ship it by the end of the quarter, like adding resource to allow the team to go faster. It often also forces us to make painful scope cuts, where we reduce some aspect from a ‘must-have’ to a ‘nice-to-have’ (which, if you know anything about software development, more often than not means it won’t actually get done).

What frequently happens is that once we launch a feature and get it into customers’ hands, the first requests we get aren’t for the thing we deprioritized, but for something completely different. This proves the value of shipping quickly: neither us nor our customers are good at predicting how they will actually interact with a feature once it’s actually live in the product. The only reliable way to determine that is to ship fast and iterate after.

Bias for action

One other aspect of always be shipping in our product management org is a bias for action. We’re always acting with imperfect information. If we waited for perfect information, we would never make any decisions. Therefore, as product managers, we’re responsible for pushing decisions forward, even in the face of uncertainty. It is rare that decisions can’t be corrected later on, so moving forward beats endlessly deliberating. Act, don’t talk.

Own it

Ownership is very important at RevenueCat. For product managers, it means that nothing is someone else’s problem. We all win together, we all lose together. If you notice a problem, do something about it — even if it’s not your area.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that product managers have to fix all problems. However, since they’re often the ones with the broadest, most end-to-end understanding (from customer problem to solution design to technical approach), they’re often the ones who are best positioned to notice problems (and are expected to do so).

RevenueCat product managers also have high agency, meaning we believe in their ability to affect change even in adverse conditions. Our PMs will do everything they can to address the problems they see, and sometimes even a bit more than that (i.e., learn something new to better solve problems). They dig through the code base to see if they can find the root cause of a bug, they query our data warehouse to better understand our data, or they get on a call with a customer on short notice to debug their issues.

AI-assisted development also means that product managers are now making contributions to our code base on a somewhat regular basis. In cases where the changes are straightforward, it is often significantly faster for a PM to make a change directly via Cursor or Claude Code and get it reviewed and shipped, versus writing a ticket for an engineer to pick up.

TL;DR: there’s a lot going on, and it’s all hands on-deck. 

Balance

Our balance value is perhaps the most misunderstood — it doesn’t mean we’re slacking off (on the contrary, RevenueCat is still a startup and working here is deliberately intense). We only win if we continue to move fast.

However, our balance value reminds us that there is a fine line between moving fast and burning out. Hard work can be extremely rewarding if we are working on interesting problems with teams of highly-motivated people. PMs are often pivotal in upholding the motivation and interest level of the team; it’s their job to connect the problems we’re solving with the customer impact, e.g. sharing customer ‘good feels’ and showcasing contagious excitement.

Our balance value also covers being empathetic and kind toward others, and building a cohesive team environment where there’s mutual trust and appreciation of everyone as a human being. Product managers, as natural leaders, can play a key role in modeling and facilitating these behaviors.

RevenueCat’s talent vision

RevenueCat’s talent vision is to build a winning team of high-caliber team members. This means that we have a high standard for all team members, which we uphold through our hiring and performance management processes.

There are a few implications of that on our product management approach. Firstly, our teams consist of relatively senior and product-minded engineers and engineering managers. This means that PMs at RevenueCat generally need to be less in-the-weeds in managing projects, creating super detailed tickets, etc. Instead, they need to be better at communicating the necessary context and understanding of the problem space, in order for engineers to not get bottlenecked by PM decision making.

It also means that our team is rather lean. We believe that smaller teams of high-caliber people can move much faster than bigger teams with a lower talent bar.

The main challenges our PM org is facing

Here are some of the main challenges that we face as product managers at RevenueCat.

Too much to do, too little time

This might be the quintessential startup issue, and it’s definitely true at RevenueCat: we always have more ideas, and more customer problems to solve than we have the capacity to work on. This means that as a company, as individual teams, and as PMs, we have to prioritize well, and be able to communicate that prioritization to the market, to customers, and to internal stakeholders. We solve this through our strategy and planning process to make sure we continuously focus on the highest-impact opportunities.

Balancing customer obsession and strategic priorities

Related to the need for prioritization outlined above, we’re often drawn in different directions by our customer obsession value and our strategic priorities. Strategic projects can take a while before showing impact, and our customer obsession value makes us consider smaller customer requests with urgency. Getting drawn to either extreme is not great: if we deprioritize customer feedback completely to focus on long-term strategic priorities, we will seem unresponsive and risk losing the customer love we’ve built up. On the other hand, if we only prioritize being attentive to customer feedback, we miss out on big swings, following the market, or unlocking the next big opportunities for the product and the company.

Growth means increasing coordination

RevenueCat has shown a great growth trajectory over the past few years. We have grown our team less quickly than our revenue (part of the winning team talent vision), but we still have grown and are planning to continue to do so. A bigger EPD team means more capacity to improve our products, but it also means increased coordination needed. Doubling our engineering team doesn’t mean we can ship twice as many changes, since some of that capacity will need to go toward coordinating work. Plus, adding more teams increases the risk of building experiences that are inconsistent between different corners of the product (which again requires coordination to prevent).

Becoming a multi-product company

The biggest strategic challenge we have in front of us is moving from a single-product company to a multi-product company. RevenueCat has long been the best way of adding in-app purchases to your app. This means that a large proportion of subscription apps on the app stores launch with RevenueCat today. However, the market of new subscription apps is limited. 

To keep growing, we need to both be able to provide more value to our existing target market, and sell to customers for which the current RevenueCat product is not a good fit. Both of these require becoming a multi-product company: either adding completely new products or unbundling our existing product into pieces that can be sold separately. 

We’re planning both, and that means fundamentally changing the process for how we make product decisions. We need to build experiences that make sense when you are using only part of the platform. We need to set up pricing and billing models. We need to conceive onboarding flows that find the right product and set it up.

We are only at the beginning of this journey, and it will keep us busy for the foreseeable future.

What makes for a good RevenueCat PM

Still with me? Okay, let’s jump into what makes a good fit for product managers at RevenueCat. Maybe you’re the right fit, or perhaps you know someone who is?

  • Builders, not managers: RevenueCat PMs see themselves as product builders. We don’t manage backlogs or juggle stakeholders — we collaborate, advocate for the best solutions, and help our teams move faster.
  • Missionaries: Our mission is to help developers make more money, and PMs embrace that fully. We’re customer-obsessed because we believe more software is good for the world, and thriving developers means more software. 
  • Extreme ownership: RevenueCat PMs do everything it takes to solve customer problems and make the product successful. They don’t point fingers, blame others, or accept failure; they find a way forward while contributing as true teammates and carrying shared weight, rather than being a lone wolf. 
  • Decisive with imperfect info: In a fast-paced startup, PMs gather just enough information to make a decision quickly. They act based on current data, commit to the action path, and rally the team, but stay open to changing course if needed when new information arrives.
  • Deep technical understanding: RevenueCat meets multiple personas, but at its core it’s a developer tool. PMs need to have deep technical knowledge and be able to explain and evaluate decisions about APIs, distributed systems, SDK constraints, and data models.
  • Strong asynchronous communicator: As a globally remote team, RevenueCat PMs excel at clear async communication — whether through docs, Looms, or FigJams — and they know when to switch to real-time conversations to keep the team aligned.

We’re hiring!

We’re almost constantly growing the product management team at RevenueCat. If you’re a builder who loves solving hard problems with meaningful impact — and you want to help tens of thousands of developers make a living doing what they love — we’d love to talk. Check out our open roles on our careers page!