Product Manager, Live Operations

Location: Remote

Team: Product

About Pocket Worlds

At Pocket Worlds, we build virtual worlds that connect people through play, creativity, and community. Our flagship product, Highrise, is a mobile-first social universe with over 50 million registered users worldwide. In Highrise, players create avatars, make friends, host events, and express themselves in a vibrant, ever-evolving world.

We are building a long-lived social platform, not a content treadmill. Live operations exist to continuously create player value, deepen engagement, and keep the world feeling alive and worth returning to. Monetization supports that goal—it does not define it.

We move quickly, set a high bar, and operate with clear ownership. Our culture values speed, clarity, and direct collaboration.

The Role

We are looking for a Product Manager, Live Operations to own the strategy, planning, and execution of Highrise’s live roadmap, including events, initiatives, seasonal programming, and major live releases.

This role owns a $20M+ Live Operations P&L and is directly responsible for shipping products and experiences that players choose to pay for because they deliver real value. Success in this role requires balancing player trust, engagement, and long-term health with strong business outcomes.

You will plan, forecast, and sequence high-impact LiveOps beats that serve both:

• Paying players, who expect fairness, clarity, and meaningful ownership

• The broader community, whose engagement and sentiment sustain the world

While LiveOps initiatives may include paid items, offers, or systems, the core mandate is to create value worth paying for, not to maximize short-term extraction.

The scope is similar to a Head of LiveOps role, executed through a product management lens: clear strategy, strong planning rigor, tight feedback loops, and full ownership of outcomes.

What You’ll Do

• Own the Live Operations roadmap and P&L, accountable for player value, engagement, and revenue outcomes.

• Plan and forecast LiveOps performance, including revenue, participation, retention, and sentiment impact.

• Ship live products that players pay for, ensuring they feel valuable, fair, and worth owning.

• Define and sequence high-impact LiveOps initiatives that create anticipation, momentum, and habit-forming engagement.

• Balance paid and non-paid experiences, ensuring LiveOps serves both spenders and the broader community.

• Ensure every LiveOps initiative answers a clear player question: “Why should I care about this right now?”

• Partner closely with design, engineering, art, economy, analytics, and community teams to deliver LiveOps at scale.

• Use data, forecasting, and player feedback to iterate on future roadmaps and investment decisions.

• Make explicit tradeoffs between short-term performance and long-term player trust.

• Own key LiveOps metrics, including revenue, ARPU, participation rates, retention, engagement, and sentiment signals.

What Great Looks Like

• Strong intuition for player value: you understand what players will happily pay for versus what damages trust.

• P&L ownership mindset: comfort owning revenue forecasts, performance reviews, and tradeoffs.

• Excellent LiveOps judgment: you know how to pace, bundle, and sequence initiatives for compounding impact.

• Systems thinker: you see how events, progression, social mechanics, and paid ownership reinforce each other.

• Player trust as a hard constraint: clarity, fairness, and optionality are non-negotiable.

• Data-driven and forecast-oriented: you plan ahead, define success clearly, and adapt based on results.

• High ownership: you take responsibility for outcomes and push initiatives forward decisively.

• Clear, direct collaborator: you align teams around priorities and make tradeoffs explicit.

Requirements

• 3+ years of experience in product management, live operations, systems design, economy design, or monetization for live or free-to-play products.

• Demonstrated experience shipping live products that players pay for.

• Experience owning or meaningfully contributing to revenue forecasts, P&L, or business performance.

• Strong analytical skills with the ability to connect player behavior, sentiment, and revenue outcomes.

• Experience working cross-functionally in fast-moving environments.

• Clear, concise communication skills.

• Comfort operating in a fully remote, high-ownership setting.

Nice to Have

• Experience with social products, virtual worlds, or creator-driven platforms.

• Familiarity with virtual economies and digital ownership.

• Experience with fashion, either digital of physical.

• Experience forecasting LiveOps performance and managing live P&L tradeoffs.

• Background in experimentation, behavioral economics, or game analytics.

Why Join Us

• Meaningful ownership: direct responsibility for a $20M+ LiveOps business.

• Player impact at scale: your decisions shape how tens of millions of players experience value in Highrise.

• Product-first culture: revenue follows player value, not the other way around.

• Fully remote: work from anywhere.