Associate Product Manager

About YAL.ai and Discovery

YAL is building Discovery - an intent-driven social platform that connects people through situation-based matching. We help people find the one specific person who has been in their exact situation and can actually help. We are launching across IITs, IIMs, and top campuses in India. The team is 15 people, the product is launching in 18 days, and the work is real from day one.

The Role

You will work directly with the product lead and own the operational product layer that makes execution possible - research synthesis, engineering coordination, design review, EIR programme intelligence, and user feedback triage. You are not managing people. You are making sure the right information gets to the right person at the right time so that decisions happen fast and well.

What You Will Do

Product intelligence and research

• Own the EIR product intelligence system - read conversation notes coming in from 22 campuses, run the extraction pipeline, identify patterns, and deliver a weekly synthesised report to the product lead.
• Audit research quality - identify when EIR conversations have sampling bias, leading questions, or weak methodology before that data reaches product decisions.
• Cross-check qualitative interview findings against survey data and produce a reconciled picture of what users actually want versus what they say they want.
• Turn research into product recommendations with evidence attached - not summaries, decisions.

Engineering coordination

• Attend daily standups across all engineering teams, summarise, flag blockers, and escalate only what genuinely needs the product lead.
• Own minor product decisions within defined boundaries. Make the call and document it. Escalate the ones that require strategy.
• Track sprint progress and surface risks before they become blockers.

Design review

• Own the weekly design review loop - check UI/UX decisions against PRD specs, flag deviations, write clear actionable feedback in writing.

User feedback - post launch

• Triage all incoming user feedback - categorise by type and severity, prioritise against the roadmap, and deliver a weekly prioritised list.
• Run structured feedback sessions with EIRs and early users on a standing weekly cadence.

What We Are Looking For

Must have

• 0 to 2 years of experience in a product, research, or early-stage operator role where you had no playbook and had to figure it out.
• You have done real user research - run interviews, synthesised findings, made a product recommendation from them. You can read a conversation note and tell immediately whether the methodology was right or wrong.
• You write clearly and specifically. A brief from you should not need editing before an engineer acts on it.
• You are comfortable not knowing what to work on next and figuring it out yourself.
• You have worked with or alongside a technical team and can translate between product intent and engineering constraint.
• Familiarity with the IIT or top college ecosystem as a student, graduate, or someone who has worked closely within it.

Nice to have

• Experience synthesising large volumes of qualitative research and finding non-obvious patterns.
• Prior exposure to a consumer social or community product at an early stage.

What This Is Not

This is not a structured rotation. The scope expands every week as the product grows. If you need a clean job description to know what to work on each day, this is not the right fit. If your instinct when you see a problem is to understand it fully and act on it, keep reading.

What You Get

• Direct access to the product lead and the full founding team from week one.
• Real ownership of the product intelligence and operational layer at the most consequential stage of the company.
• Competitive salary.
• Work on a product that measures success in real connections between real people, not vanity metrics.