NOW HIRING: Senior Product Manager

Company: SkyVerge
Website: https://www.skyverge.com
Headquarters: Boston, Massachusetts, United States


Howdy 👋We’re the folks at SkyVerge, and we build WordPress plugins that help over 100,000 eCommerce businesses grow and manage their WooCommerce stores. Our team is 100% remote, with 29 people distributed all over the world.

We’re looking for a driven, experienced Product Manager to help us maintain, grow, and expand our existing portfolio of 50+ individual extensions.


The Role

You’ll work closely with teammates on the support and engineering teams to evaluate and improve the user experience across our suite of products. Our customers are business owners or eCommerce store operators, so it’s important to design experiences that get out of their way, streamline their business, and help them understand best practices. You’ll be responsible for gathering customer feedback, identifying areas of improvement, and pitching solutions to these problems, then working with the rest of our team towards launching these solutions.

While the majority of your time will be spent on competitive research, customer feedback, and product development, you’ll contribute to other areas as well, such as product marketing or customer success. The right person for this role is someone who is excited to tackle new challenges across several areas, enjoys learning skills across a variety of disciplines, and wants to contribute to multiple areas of the company.
You’ll join an existing team of product managers and designers, but will manage several products independently. You’ll be responsible for taking ideas from inception to execution, and keeping both our team and customer base informed of changes. You’ll also be responsible for moving your projects forward, communicating milestones with others, and clearly documenting your work. As a remote-first, 100% distributed team, great communication and internal artifacts are vital to our success.


Here are some things you may do on a given day:

• Conduct interviews with our customers
• Develop a tracking plan for user analytics or activation metrics
• Analyze competitors and identify gaps in our product offering
• Develop pitch documents for new features or improvements to existing ones
• Provide feedback on designs and pitches from other team members, and contribute to the product design process
• Organize a group of beta testers for feedback on pitches, early designs, or a proof of concept
• Prioritize our backlog of stories, bug reports, and product improvements in Clubhouse (never seen Clubhouse? Totally okay!)
• Contribute to the QA process to ensure product updates meet our definition of done and acceptance criteria
• Communicate product updates internally to our team an externally to our customers

On the first day you will:

• Meet your team and get familiar with how we work
• Setup your environment and tooling
• Chat with a customer via a scheduled interview, email, or support conversation

In the first week you will:

• Add a story or pitch for a product improvement you’ve identified
• Review a teammate’s pitch or design
• Improve our onboarding course and design documentation based on your experience

In the first month you will:

• Work closely with the engineering team to ship a large product update (working through initial concepts and iterating on them during development)
• Publish a retrospective on your first large project to share successes, artifact the reasoning behind decisions we made, and add planned improvements for the next project

To succeed in this position, you should have:

• Experience in managing software products and the product lifecycle
• Ability to juggle multiple deadlines at once (when you work asynchronously, projects often overlap, so you tend to start the “next thing” while awaiting feedback on others)
• An obsession with streamlining user experiences and delighting the user
• Tenacity coupled with the willingness to question assumptions and dig deep to find the root cause of user confusion or issues
• Bonus points for familiarity with HTML and CSS; even more for familiarity with JavaScript, PHP, or other programming languages

Who you’ll work with:

• Beka Rice, Head of Product - You’ll work with Beka to understand our products in detail and learn all the ways that our customers use them.
• Lindsey Fogle, Product Manager - You’ll collaborate with Lindsey to learn how customers use our plugins and how we’ve evolved our product management process.
• You’ll also collaborate with our engineering team to refine project scope and review work that we ship to tens of thousands of users.

REQUIREMENTS

You

You love simplicity, and finding the straightest path from point A to point B. To you, great software is something that doesn’t feel like you need to learn it at all. You know that good product management requires an exceptional level of empathy, and you work hard to deeply understand the customer journey. Your favorite question is, “Why?” You know that all software is subject to technical constraints, so working with the engineering team closely helps you both work towards an amazing user experience while still pushing the limitations of what is possible.

You love keeping up-to-date with the latest product management best practices and tools, and are constantly tweaking and improving the way you work. You’re curious and excited to learn, so adopting new tooling or digging into a new app is something you’re keen to tackle. (After all, it is a new experience for you to learn from!) You know how to operate a hydraulic press, or at least watched a YouTube video about them and think they’re totally rad.

Finally, you can’t wait to join a small team that loves their work as much as you do, affords the opportunity to work on challenging & interesting projects, continuously learn and improve, and constantly ship your work. You’re a great writer and can communicate effectively whether drafting up a pitch document, chatting in Slack, editing a wiki page, or drafting a retrospective. You know that user experience is about good communication, so you’re committed to explaining your thought process clearly. You can communicate fluently in English, or at least as close as anyone can come to fluent English, because really, it’s English.


BENEFITS

Our team is fully-remote and we communicate primarily through Slack, Clubhouse, Google Docs, Basecamp, and a few short meetings via Zoom — we believe the best work happens when given lots of uninterrupted time that’s free of distractions.

As a remote team, we believe that regular meetups are invaluable for getting to know each other better, so you should be available for 1-2 company-paid team trips per year. Curious about what those are like? Check out our recap of our last team retreat (SkyTrip), which brought the entire team to a Scottish estate for a week. It’s a plus if you think (like we do) that bears are absolutely the coolest animals in the forest. 🐻You can see what the team has to say about working with us here.

This is a full-time, salaried position, but working hours are flexible. We know your work will speak for itself with interviews documented, pitches created, stories drafted, and wiki edits.


Process

After an initial screening, you’ll get an email with a few questions to answer. Following that, you’ll have a ~30 minute phone chat with Catherine, our Head of People Ops. Next, you'll complete a short, one-day research project.This gives you an opportunity to make sure you enjoy the work and the team, and it gives us an opportunity to evaluate your work. Following that, the most qualified candidates will have two more ~45 minute interviews with a couple more people on our team. If all goes well, you’ll be offered the position. 🙂


Here are some benefits we're happy to offer to our team members:

• Competitive salary
• 27 days of paid time-off, in addition to 2 company holidays (SkyVerge Day in March, Founders Day in June 😀)
• Medical, Dental, and Vision insurance for US and Canadian residents and their families (reimbursements for comparable care for non-US/Canadian residents)
• 401k/RRSP Retirement plan with 4% company match for US/Canadian residents (contributions to comparable plans for non-US/Canadian residents)
• 8 weeks paid parental leave for new mothers and fathers
• Work flexible hours from anywhere that has a reliable internet connection
• Tools (hardware/software) to help you be productive
• Allowance for professional growth (books, courses, conferences)
• Home office or co-working allowance
• A Kindle to help you keep learning

We support workplace diversity and do not discriminate on any protected class. We believe when we work together as a team of different views, experiences, and ideas, we can build amazing things.

Applications accepted through November 1st.

CLICK HERE TO APPLY


Source: Remote OK, SkyVerge