Product Growth Manager, Organic

About Substack

Substack is building a new economic engine for culture, giving the brightest, most interesting, and most creative people on the internet the power of their own publishing platform. Substack empowers independent writers, artists, videographers, podcasters, and creators of all types to create, share, and make a living off their work through subscriptions — offering them creative freedom, ownership, and a direct connection to their audiences.

We're growing fast. Millions of readers come to Substack directly every month, and our app is the primary destination for our most engaged users. We're looking for a rare hybrid — someone who thinks like a product manager, works closely with engineers, and has deep expertise in the organic growth levers that compound over time: SEO, ASO, and new user onboarding.

The Role

This is a new role on the Growth team, sitting at the intersection of product and marketing. You'll own the organic side of our user acquisition flywheel — ensuring that Substack is discoverable at every surface where people are looking for great writing and ideas, and that when they find us, the experience from first click to first subscription is as frictionless as possible.

You'll report to the Head of Growth and work in close partnership with the Head of Paid Acquisition — particularly on shared infrastructure like top-of-funnel attribution, deferred deep linking, and bespoke app store landing pages. Where the paid acquisition role focuses on driving incremental new users through media spend, this role focuses on making sure the organic funnel is healthy, scalable, and continuously improving.

This is a hybrid role in the truest sense: you'll write product specs and work tickets with engineers one day, and audit keyword rankings or optimize an App Store listing the next. You should be comfortable in both modes and know which one the moment calls for.

What You'll Do

SEO

• Own Substack's SEO strategy across branded and non-branded queries — protecting and growing our domain authority, expanding reach into high-intent topic and creator-adjacent searches, and tracking ranking performance across key verticals

• Partner with product and engineering to ensure that any product-level changes (new pages, URL structures, navigation, rendering, indexability) have SEO implications accounted for before shipping, not after

• Own SEO across the website and publication pages, including structured data, page speed, crawlability, and content architecture

• Stay ahead of the curve on answer engine optimization (AEO) — ensuring Substack content and creator pages are well-represented in AI-generated search results and featured snippets as search behavior evolves

• Develop and maintain an SEO performance dashboard that gives the team visibility into organic traffic trends, ranking movements, and opportunity sizing

ASO & App Store Optimization

• Own App Store and Google Play listing optimization across all Substack surfaces: the main app listing, bespoke vertical landing pages, and creator-specific pages

• Design and run experiments to improve app install conversion rates, working with creative and data teams to test copy, screenshots, preview videos, and ratings/review strategy

• Partner with the Head of Paid Acquisition on paid-to-organic handoffs — particularly where paid campaigns drive traffic to custom App Store landing pages and ASO affects the downstream conversion rate

• Monitor competitor ASO strategies and maintain keyword coverage across category-relevant and creator-adjacent search terms in both stores

Top-of-Funnel Attribution & Onboarding

• Own top-of-funnel attribution infrastructure in partnership with engineering and the paid acquisition team — ensuring we can accurately measure where new users come from across organic, paid, and referral channels

• Manage and improve our deferred deep linking setup (AppsFlyer / OneLink) for organic entry points: SEO landing pages, App Store pages, referral links, and creator-shared URLs

• Work with product and engineering to design and iterate on the new user onboarding experience, with a particular focus on users arriving from organic channels who may have lower initial intent than paid-acquired users

• Define and instrument the funnel events needed to measure organic acquisition quality — from first touch through free subscription, app activation, and first paid conversion

What We're Looking For

• 5–8 years of experience spanning SEO, ASO, and/or product growth — with demonstrable depth in at least two of the three, and enough fluency in the third to hold your own

• Product management experience or strong product instincts: you've written specs, worked in sprints with engineers, and understand how to navigate a product roadmap to get growth work prioritized

• Technical SEO fluency — you understand how rendering, crawlability, structured data, Core Web Vitals, and site architecture affect rankings, and you can have a substantive conversation with an engineer about any of them

• Hands-on ASO experience including keyword research, listing copy optimization, creative testing, and conversion rate analysis across both the App Store and Google Play

• Familiarity with MMP infrastructure (AppsFlyer preferred), deferred deep linking, and attribution modeling for organic channels

• Strong analytical skills — you can build your own analyses, define the right success metrics for an experiment, and know the difference between a signal and noise in an A/B test

• Experience with answer engine optimization (AEO) and an understanding of how AI-powered search is changing organic discovery — or a clear point of view on how to think about it

• High agency and strong written communication — this role requires influencing engineering and product partners without direct authority, which means making crisp cases for why growth work should be prioritized

• Genuine interest in media, publishing, and the creator economy. Substack's SEO surface is fundamentally about great writing — you should care about what's being discovered, not just whether it's indexed

• Based in San Francisco or New York

How This Role Fits into the Growth Team

This role and the Head of Paid Acquisition are designed to be complementary and tightly integrated:

Head of Paid Acquisition Product Growth Manager Channel focus Paid media (Meta, YouTube, podcast, etc.) SEO, ASO, organic referral Primary metric CPI, iROAS, paid subscription conversion Organic installs, ranking, install CVR Shared infrastructure AppsFlyer, deferred deep links, onboarding AppsFlyer, deferred deep links, onboarding Shared surfaces Custom App Store landing pages Custom App Store landing pages Engineering relationship Instrumentation, event tracking Product specs, SEO/onboarding builds

Both roles report to the Head of Growth and are expected to collaborate closely — particularly on attribution infrastructure, App Store page optimization, and the new user onboarding experience.

Compensation

Substack's compensation package includes a market-competitive salary, equity for all full-time roles, and exceptional benefits. Our cash compensation range for this role is $190,000–$230,000. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including candidate experience and expertise.

Substack is an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity or transgender status), age, national origin, veteran or disability status. We're seeking people passionate about enabling independent expression and building a better business model for creators. If you want to see what media, communities, and content can become when unmoored from advertising models, and you have the skills and experience to contribute, we'd love to meet you.

Substack is an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity or transgender status), age, national origin, veteran or disability status. We’re seeking people passionate about enabling independent expression and building a better business model for creators. If you want to see what media, communities, and content can become when unmoored from advertising models, and you have the skills and experience to contribute, we’d love to meet you.

Please see our Privacy Notice for details regarding Substack's collection and use of personal information relating to the application and recruitment process by clicking here.