Product Lead

About Cedar

Cedar is creating the most significant innovation in home affordability since the 30-year mortgage. By reimagining the land lease as a consumer-first model, Cedar makes homeownership more accessible and sustainable for a wider range of buyers. We are actually solving home affordability at scale – this is one of the most pressing problems in our country today and we are fixing it. Our structure meaningfully reduces both the upfront cost of purchasing a home and monthly costs. We expand the path to ownership for people who have been locked out of traditional markets and help existing homeowners access their equity at cost well below existing solutions. Cedar is already making a substantial impact for homeowners and we have material backing from top investors. Join our fast-growing and high-performing team as we fundamentally change how people buy homes and create a new institutional asset class.

About the Role

As Product Lead at Cedar, you will own the product vision and direction end-to-end. You are the single accountable leader for defining what we build, why we build it, and how it delivers value to homeowners, real estate professionals, and lending partners.

This is a high-agency, senior role in an early-stage company. You will work directly with the CEO, partner closely with the Founding Senior Software Engineer (CTO-track), and collaborate day-to-day with Product Engineers. You will operate close to the code and close to customers, combining deep domain understanding with strong product judgment.

The ideal candidate brings firsthand experience with mortgage, home equity, or residential real estate brokerage products, and understands how consumers evaluate affordability, trust financial products, and make high-stakes housing decisions.

What You’ll Do

Product Vision & Ownership

• Own Cedar’s product vision across consumer, partner, and internal platforms

• Define and continuously refine product strategy and sequencing

• Make final prioritization decisions, balancing user value, risk, regulatory constraints, and speed

User & Domain Leadership

• Serve as the voice of the customer: homeowners, buyers, agents, loan officers, and distribution partners

• Apply prior experience with mortgage, HELOC, home equity, reverse mortgage, or real estate brokerage platforms to product decisions

• Deeply understand real estate acquisition funnels, agent workflows, and borrower decision-making

• Conduct user research and field work to uncover friction, confusion, and unmet needs

• Translate complex financial and real estate concepts into simple, intuitive product experiences

Execution & Delivery

• Write clear, opinionated product requirements and success metrics

• Partner tightly with engineers to shape solutions and resolve tradeoffs

• Stay close to implementation—reviewing flows, validating logic, and iterating quickly

• Work with marketing on customer-facing messaging, education, and product launches

Cross-Functional Leadership

• Act as the connective tissue between engineering, design, marketing, and leadership

• Ensure product decisions align with Cedar’s mission, business model, and risk posture

• Maintain a high bar for clarity, quality, and real-world usability

What We Need

We are looking for a Product Lead with strong judgment, high agency, and deep domain experience in residential real estate and/or mortgage-related products. You should understand how consumers discover homes, think about leverage and monthly payments, evaluate risk, and decide whom to trust in complex transactions.

Experience building mortgage, HELOC, home equity, reverse mortgage, or real estate brokerage products—particularly on the customer acquisition, transaction, or agent-facing side (e.g., Compass or Zillow-like platforms)—is highly valued.

You are technically fluent and comfortable working closely with engineers, but your core strength is product leadership: knowing what to build, what not to build, and how to sequence work to maximize trust, adoption, and impact.

This role is not about managing process or maintaining a backlog. It is about owning outcomes.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of product leadership or senior product management experience

• Direct experience with mortgage, HELOC, home equity, reverse mortgage, and/or residential real estate brokerage platforms

• Experience with consumer acquisition funnels, agent tools, or transaction workflows strongly preferred

• Strong technical fluency; comfortable operating close to engineering and codebases

• Proven track record of defining product direction and shipping meaningful products

Why Choose Cedar?

• Take real ownership early — the work is not theoretical

• Grow through direct feedback, rigorous debate, and steep responsibility

• Be pushed to develop judgment, not just skills

• Build a track record that compounds — responsibility scales with performance

Cedar is built for people who want to operate at a very high level on work that matters. We run a true owner’s culture: high standards, direct feedback, fast iteration, and accountability to outcomes. You’ll have real responsibility early, you’ll be expected to think—not just execute—and you’ll be surrounded by teammates who push hard and care deeply about excellence.

This is not a company for people who need perfect clarity, gentle consensus, or predictable routines. The pace is fast, the problems are complex, and the bar is high. But the upside is rare: steep growth, meaningful autonomy, and the chance to do career-defining work with a team that treats the mission seriously and rewards success well.

If you want comfort, you won’t like it here. If you want to build, learn, and win—Cedar is the place.