Our first Product Manager

Your day to day

You are the ambassador for the customer, clarity and context within the company. You'll be working with designers, co-ordinating and understanding user research and helping to shape the interface of our products. You'll also be deeply engaged with the engineering team collaborating to break down the designs and features you prioritize into concrete, doable and interesting work. You make sure everyone understands the What, Why, Who and When of a project and collaborate, inform and support the engineers and designers as they define the How.

At any moment in time you might be context switching between three time horizons:

- The current sprint, bringing clarity to ambiguity, cutting scope to meet deadlines and providing context to decisions.

- The next sprint, pulling in eng leads and designers to make sure that the work is defined, scoped and agreed on.

- The next three months as you look towards the next milestone, thinking about upcoming dependencies and other decisions that need to be made now to make sure we're able to keep moving at pace.

You're not just working with engineers and designers within the company. There's a whole ecosystem of Filament external experts and contractors, from engineering specialists to iconographers to sound designers that look to you for clarity. They don't possess the same commonly-held context as folks internally so the direction you provide has to be more well-defined and comprehensive than for the internal people you're interacting with daily. They may also be in different timezones meaning your ability to provide the right information to keep them moving while you sleep is critical.

Signals you might fit well with this job

These are not hard and fast requirements. Some of the best people we’ve ever hired have not ‘fit the profile’ and we prize above all the curiosity and ability to learn fast and adapt. Think of these as useful guidelines to understand more about the job itself.

  • You have a technical background that compliments your product and design sense. Engineers suspect you used to be an engineer, designers suspect you used to be a designer.

  • You’ve built communication or social collaboration platforms in the past and have a keen set of heuristics for identifying hidden challenges

  • You get excited when you get to spend time with customers and feel real empathy for their needs and problems. 

  • You learned product at a larger company that grounded you well in core practices but have spent enough time in early-stage companies to know what translates and what doesn’t.

  • You enjoy reading and know how to write with clarity and concision

  • You believe in adaptability and getting your hands dirty. When you need to you can gather useful insights from a user research session, sketch out an alternate design or prototype a flow in figma, code or AI tools to create clarity.

  • You recognize that new AI tools can scale you in new ways and have been keenly exploring these as they drop new capabilities

  • You have strong experience with metrics, but are experienced enough to know that optimizing solely for metrics can backfire. You believe in holistic product vision and taste.