Ashby - Staff Product Manager

• Drive Impact: Deeply understand our customers and ship impactful product improvements and investments to maintain our strong velocity. • Quality: Apply your strong product taste and sound judgement to deliver solutions that are both powerful and a joy to use. Use your judgment to identify areas where we need to improve quality before shipping. • Prioritization and Strategy: Maintain a roadmap to ensure engineering is never blocked, and set a compelling strategy and vision for the next 6-18 months. • Customer Research: Spend time with customers and customer-facing teams. Synthesize customer feedback, research, and competitive intel to drive smart prioritization choices. • Execution Excellence: Set the pace for your product area by identifying bottlenecks, scoping effectively, and driving projects toward high-impact releases. Stay close to engineering work to navigate tradeoffs, manage technical risks, and resolve execution challenges. • Cross-functional Collaboration: Partner across go-to-market teams to bring the features and products your team builds to the market. Anticipate and plan for the needs to help inform pricing, marketing, and customer support. • Ownership and reliability: follow through on commitments, manage time ruthlessly, respond promptly to stakeholders, and communicate proactively when priorities or timelines change. • YOU COULD BE A GREAT FIT IF • You have an unnatural curiosity and excitement about the end-user and the jobs they do • You bring an Engineering mindset to product problems and can think through edge cases and understand how to extend our underlying platform to create leverage • You can demonstrate taste - you care about the quality of the products you build and use • You're an excellent writer and synthesizer; you bring product knowledge and clarity to the entire organization and enable Engineers with product insights • You can build a thesis for prioritization and communicate priorities using a sound strategy that combines principled thinking, research, and data • You leverage tools and processes to build operational excellence into your product process • You have a strong business sense and understand how product and GTM should collaborate, how your features may be monetized, and how product priorities fit into larger business priorities • YOU MAY NOT BE A GREAT FIT IF • You prefer to specify exactly what Engineering should build rather than give engineers room to own the solution. • You dislike written documentation and prefer to manage the team via meetings and quick Slack messages. • You’re primarily interested in shipping features and not thinking through how to make them reusable platform capabilities. • You don’t enjoy doing deep research yourself and prefer to outsource that UX research, market research, and data teams. • You’re uncomfortable moving with urgency, making tradeoffs, and reprioritizing when new information emerges. • You’re primarily motivated by achieving a metric more than delivering a great product experience for customers. • WE WORK DIFFERENTLY • At Ashby, the role of Product Managers is different from what I’ve seen in most product orgs. At a high level, PMs are responsible for shipping impactful product changes at high velocity, consistently and over an extended period. When we think about impactful product changes, our primary goal is to remove frustration and add delight. • At many organizations, PMs are required to write detailed specs that handle every edge case. Designers are required to mock up every pixel. At Ashby, it’s different. We believe individual contributors do their best work when they have a deep understanding of the end user and the business, and ownership of the solution. This is reflected in the engineers Ashby hires: they own projects end-to-end and deeply understand the problems they are solving. PMs are expected to give significant white space in their specs. As a result, PMs can spend less time managing tickets and more time with customers and thinking deeply about the product strategy. • At Ashby, PMs need to be the pace-setters for their product areas. This means they bring a healthy level of impatience and time-paranoia to the table. This does not mean cutting corners or demanding that engineers work unreasonable hours. As a PM, you can help engineers by managing the project scope well, identifying when it’s appropriate to bring in help, or being ruthless about prioritization. • For PM roles at Ashby, we believe great products are built through deep thinking and a clear understanding of user needs. A major part of your role involves conducting thorough user research to uncover underlying customer problems and translating those insights into well-reasoned product strategies. • Finally, Ashby isn’t simply an ATS. Right from the foundations, it was designed to be much more than that. It’s a platform modelled around how organizations (from early-stage startups to massive enterprises) think about recruiting, managing, and retaining top talent. As a PM at Ashby, you should, over time, get familiar with our most common building blocks. You’ll invest not only in product improvements but in platform thinking.