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 home ownership more accessible and sustainable for a wider range of buyers. Cedar is solving home affordability at scale and is fixing a pressing problem in our country today. Our structure reduces both upfront costs and monthly costs, expands the path to ownership, and helps homeowners access their equity at cost below existing solutions.

Cedar is backed by top investors and is building a fast-growing, high-performing team to change how people buy homes and create a new institutional asset class.

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.

• 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

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…