ispeedtolead - Product Owner

• Take product briefs and decompose them into shippable increments. A 3-week ticket is a planning failure, and it is yours. • Own the backlog end-to-end: acceptance criteria, edge cases, definition of done, all in place before an engineer touches anything. • Weigh every increment against its cost: engineering effort vs expected value and cost of delay. Cheap and high-value ships first; expensive and speculative waits. • Prioritize with a visible score, not a feeling. Anyone can challenge it; you defend it with numbers. • Own communication outward: founders, sales, support, and the PM always know what's shipping, what's next, and what changed, without anyone interrupting the team to ask. • Keep the team unblocked and own the delivery numbers (cycle time, predictability, carryover, QA flow) as tools to spot problems early. Hygiene, not the mission. • Push back on the PM when a brief is not buildable. That friction is the system working. • This is not for you if • You see yourself as a delivery manager who moves tickets. The "what ships" decisions are yours to make, not yours to receive. • Your main skill is running ceremonies. • You sequence by gut rather than by value and cost. • You want to own product direction. That is a different role. • What we expect from you (first 3 months) • We don't do long onboarding. Access on day one, context in days, a real problem in week one. We hire people who create value with incomplete information, because that is the job every day after probation too. • End of month 1: you know the codebase map and the team; the queue is fully yours, continuously ordered with a visible score; baseline flow metrics captured (cycle time and WIP), because you cannot improve what you did not measure. • End of month 3 (the bar): cycle time visibly better than your month-1 baseline with before/after to show; founders fully out of the delivery loop (prioritization, scope, and ship decisions run without us); briefs turning into shipped product, in the right increments, without anyone pushing. • How we work with you: honest checkpoints at 2 weeks, 1 month, 2 months. We judge trajectory, not perfection. Wrong fast and corrected beats slow and safe. If the fit is wrong, we both know by month 2 and say it out loud.