Product Manager - Story Engine

Product Manager – Story Engine

Location: West Coast, US (Hybrid / Remote-friendly)
Reports to: CEO
Compensation: $150k/year + equity

Our Vision

We’re building the creative foundation for how teams make film, animation, and AI-generated media. The centerpiece is Story Engine: a production-grade system for turning ideas into structured story worlds then iterating collaboratively from pre-production through post.

Imagine the collaborative power of Figma combined with the professional tooling of Premiere Pro, grounded in real storytelling workflows and amplified by AI. This isn’t another one-off AI tool. It’s an extensible platform for serious iterative storytelling.

The Role

We’re looking for a Product Manager to help shape the product direction, roadmap, and outcomes for Story Engine - our core creative surface and future B2B Saas. This is a foundational role: you’ll define what we build, why it matters, and how we ship it. You’ll work hands-on across discovery and execution, partnering closely with Engineering, Design, and our creative/production teams to build software that creators genuinely rely on.

You’ll be close to the work: scoping workflows, validating with users, shaping MVPs, and driving launches that improve real production outcomes; while aligning the product vision and tradeoffs across the CEO, Head of Engineering, and CCO so strategy, craft, and execution stay tightly connected.

What You’ll Own

• Story Engine strategy: articulate the product vision for how Story Engine evolves across pre-production → production → post → transmedia
• Roadmap + prioritization: turn company goals and production needs into a clear, sequenced roadmap with measurable outcomes
• Invent the next-generation creative workflow for AI filmmaking: Designing new product surfaces that don’t just mirror legacy tools, but unlock fundamentally faster and more expressive ways for creatives to build, iterate, and ship stories in the AI era.
• Quality + reliability of the product: ensure Story Engine becomes trusted and stable as a production tool—not just exciting demos
• Cross-functional alignment: keep Engineering, Creative/Production, and customer-facing stakeholders aligned on what matters

What You’ll Do

• Define the north star for Story Engine and communicate it simply to the team and stakeholders
• Lead product discovery: customer interviews, shadowing, rapid prototyping, and validation with real productions
• Partner with Engineering + Design to ship end-to-end features: clear specs, crisp tradeoffs, tight feedback loops, great UX
• Establish the product operating cadence: quarterly direction, monthly milestones, weekly priorities, demos, and learning loops
• Build the metrics & instrumentation plan: activation, retention, time-to-first-output, iteration velocity, quality/reliability indicators
• Define and drive the product requirements and decision framework for the core platform primitives that make Story Engine powerful—partnering with Engineering on architecture and implementation.
• Drive launches: internal rollouts with productions + external releases with clear positioning and narrative
• Evolve Story Engine from a beloved internal production tool into a sticky, client-facing product—with the reliability, onboarding, permissions, and value packaging required to scale as a B2B SaaS platform.

Who You Are

You’re a senior product leader who can translate messy creative reality into crisp software—and you’re comfortable being both strategic and hands-on.

You might be a great fit if you:

• Have 3–5+ years in product (or equivalent) with experience owning a core surface end-to-end
• Have shipped products in one or more of: creative tools, collaborative software, media pipelines, developer tools, or AI-native workflows
• Can run discovery deeply (not performatively): you care about workflows, constraints, edge cases, and what actually ships
• Have strong product craft: UX judgment, prioritization, crisp writing, and the ability to make tradeoffs without thrash
• Are technically fluent: you can partner with engineers on architecture, data models, reliability, and integration patterns
• Thrive in early-stage environments: ambiguity, speed, directness, and high ownership

Bonus Points For

• Experience building tools for film/animation pipelines, game production, or serious creator workflows
• Familiarity with asset graphs, versioning/lineage, collaboration models (roles/permissions), or timeline-based editing
• Prior experience at pre-seed/seed or as a founding PM / early product leader
• Strong POV on how generative tools fit into real production (not just prompts, but iteration + review + reuse)

What Success Looks Like (First 6–12 Months)

• Story Engine has a clear product direction and a roadmap that consistently ships meaningful improvements
• The team has a reliable cadence: fewer thrash cycles, tighter scopes, clearer outcomes
• Story Engine becomes production-trusted: measurable gains in stability, performance, and usability
• Real users can go from “idea → structured story world → iterated outputs” faster, with less friction
• We have strong feedback loops: instrumentation + qualitative insights inform every major bet

Why Join Wonder

This is a chance to lead the product that will fundamentally change how stories are told. You’ll work directly with founders, engineers, and creators building the next generation of AI-native filmmaking and media tools—where product decisions shape how new stories get made.

About Wonder

Wonder is an AI-native creative studio and product company building tools for high-quality original content. Backed by leaders from OpenAI, DeepMind, ElevenLabs, and more, we exist to remove traditional production barriers and unlock a new wave of creative expression—across branded work, original IP, animation, and experimental film.