Product Associate

About the Role Kumu is looking for a Product Associate who is curious about people, obsessed with making things easier to use, and excited about turning ideas and user problems into actual product experiences. You don't need years of Product Management experience for this role. We're open to fresh graduates, career shifters, junior designers, and early-career professionals who can demonstrate strong product thinking, attention to detail, and an ability to understand how real people use technology. Our users come from different walks of life — from working professionals and everyday earners to parents, titos and titas, creators, community leaders, and people who simply found their corner of the internet on Kumu. That means we don't build only for people who are highly technical or constantly trying the newest apps. Good product design at Kumu should feel intuitive even when nobody explains it. You'll work closely with Product, Design, Engineering, Data, Operations, and other teams to help turn ideas into clear product requirements and user experiences. What You'll Do Product Requirements & Documentation

• Assist in creating, maintaining, and improving Product Requirements Documents (PRDs) for new features, enhancements, and product fixes.
• Translate business requests, user problems, and internal ideas into clear requirements, user stories, acceptance criteria, flows, and expected behaviors.
• Keep PRDs updated as requirements evolve and help ensure Product, Engineering, QA, and stakeholders are working from the same understanding.
• Ask the questions that uncover missing scenarios, edge cases, and unclear requirements before they become development problems. UI/UX & Product Experience
• Help conceptualize user journeys, wireframes, screen flows, and interface improvements for Kumu.
• Think critically about whether a feature is understandable from the perspective of an everyday Kumu user — not just the people building it.
• Review existing experiences and identify unnecessary steps, confusing copy, unclear buttons, or friction in user journeys.
• Work with Product and technical teams to translate requirements into experiences that are simple, practical, and realistic to build.
• Support usability testing, user feedback sessions, and other lightweight UX research activities. User & Product Discovery
• Talk to users and internal teams to understand what people are actually trying to accomplish — not just what feature they're asking for.
• Help gather and organize insights from user feedback, support concerns, app behavior, and stakeholder requests.
• Look for patterns behind recurring user problems and help Product determine where improvements may have the greatest impact.
• Develop an understanding of Kumu's different user communities and how their behaviors, motivations, and level of digital familiarity affect product decisions. Product Execution
• Support features from idea → requirements → design → development → QA → launch → learning .
• Coordinate with Engineering, QA, Data, Operations, and other teams to clarify requirements and unblock questions during development.
• Participate in product reviews and testing to confirm that what was built matches the intended experience.
• Help document decisions, changes, open questions, and follow-up improvements.
• After launch, help review user feedback and product data to understand whether the feature actually solved the problem it was intended to solve. What We're Looking For We're less concerned about your previous job title and more interested in how you think . You might be a good fit if you:
• Can take a messy problem and organize it into something other people can understand and act on.
• Have a strong eye for UI/UX and naturally notice when an app experience feels confusing, unnecessary, or frustrating.
• Can explain why an experience works or doesn't work instead of simply saying whether you like it.
• Are genuinely curious about how people behave and why they use products differently.
• Can communicate clearly in writing — particularly when documenting requirements, decisions, and product behavior.
• Are comfortable asking questions when something doesn't make sense.
• Have strong attention to detail without losing sight of the bigger user problem.
• Can work with different personalities and functions, including technical and non-technical teams.
• Are comfortable learning unfamiliar tools, systems, and concepts independently. You Don't Need To Be
• An experienced Product Manager.
• A professional UI designer.
• A software engineer.
• Someone with a Computer Science degree.
• Someone who already knows every product framework or methodology. Fresh graduates and career shifters are welcome to apply. Experience with tools such as Figma, FigJam, Jira, Lark, Notion, or similar product/design tools is helpful, but your ability to think through a problem matters more than knowing a particular tool. What Would Make You Stand Out You'd especially catch our attention if you can show us something you've improved or designed — even if it wasn't part of a formal Product job. Maybe you've:
• redesigned an app screen because the existing one annoyed you;
• built a prototype for a school or personal project;
• mapped out how a frustrating process could work better;
• conducted research or interviewed people to understand a problem;
• created something in Figma;
• helped improve a workflow at your previous job; or
• simply have a portfolio of ideas where you can explain the problem, your thinking, and why you made the decisions you made. We care much more about how you arrived at the solution than whether the work came from a big company. The Mindset We're Looking For Kumu serves real communities of people with very different levels of familiarity with technology. Sometimes the smartest product decision isn't adding another feature. Sometimes it's removing a step. Changing a word. Making a button easier to find. Or realizing that something that feels obvious to the people who built the product isn't obvious to the person holding the phone. We're looking for someone who notices those things — and cares enough to fix them.