Full-Time Senior Product Manager
Job Description
Essence of the Role
As our first Senior Product Manager, you will play a key role in setting our product vision and strategy, design and manage the release of solutions that delight our users, and elevate the efficiency of our Product Team by guiding and mentoring your teammates.
Responsibilities
– Assist in setting high-level product vision, working closely with the Leadership Team and Product teammates to conceive and prioritize projects, utilizing a deep understanding of Catchafire users, business metrics, product metrics, and user feedback
– Design amazing products. Gather data and synthesize requirements to create innovative solutions, painstakingly detailing every aspect of functionality, user interaction, and visual design
– Guide projects from conception to implementation, bearing ultimate responsibility for their success or failure, and testing, monitoring, and revisiting them as needed to maximize their impact
– Mentor other Product Team members, fostering their improvement by overseeing projects and designing and executing plans tailored to develop your colleagues’ strengths and eliminate their weaknesses
Attributes
– Chart the path to the goal: You can envision the ideal state of the company’s product offerings weeks, months, and years into the future. You can chart multiple paths forward and weigh each possibility against the others, synthesizing information from a wide array of sources and ultimately selecting the best solution.
– Strategic thinker: You are not satisfied with unstated assumptions or with taking direction without critical evaluation. You work hard to understand the underlying purpose of each assignment and the rationale behind existing processes. You spot risks and surface latent optimizations that others miss, thus elevating your own efficiency and that of your teammates.
– Drive alignment: You are an expert negotiator. You mediate disagreements among stakeholders by providing compromise solutions that are satisfactory to all while still delighting the user. Since the outcomes of your projects rely on colleagues you do not directly manage, you are adept at crafting and communicating a vision that inspires all project participants to strive for excellence.
– Nimble: You can adapt your short and long term plans in real time to accommodate new information and changing priorities. You thrive under constraints and you are comfortable working with limited time and limited Tech resources, but you also know when circumstances demand more of both.
– Strong sense of user intuition: Your days and nights are consumed by dreaming up new and unexpected ways to delight your users. You can adopt the mindset of diverse users and peel back layer after layer of feedback and requests until you understand the root cause of each. You can clearly articulate users’ desires and assess the degree to which a single design or series of releases will fulfill those desires. You routinely discover and champion new ideas to widen your user base, drive engagement, improve conversion rates, etc.
– Data-oriented: You cite engagement metrics when prioritizing a list of projects, drop-off rates when overhauling a user flow, and the results of your latest A/B test when planning the next iteration of a feature. You are uncomfortable launching a project without specifying success metrics and scheduling time to analyze the project’s impact.
– Master product designer: You carefully consider the pros and cons of every potential design decision. You think holistically, recognizing that the impact of individual product decisions are rarely isolated. Every UI element is placed intentionally, every edge case is accounted for. You are comfortable designing in phases. You are adept at extracting an MVP from an idealized initial concept and can clearly envision the individual steps – noting risks and opportunities – that will lead to a mature product. You understand the limits imposed – and opportunities provided – by the technology underlying your projects. Your solutions are informed by a mental map of the inner workings of data-driven web applications.
– Flexible communicator: You are an expert communicator and presenter. You are comfortable communicating with audiences of all kinds and can adapt your presentation on the fly to accommodate surprises.
Experience / Background
Must Have:
– 5+ years of designing and managing complex, consumer-facing web applications
– Mastery of graphic design tools, UX principles, paper sketching, user flow analysis, and wireframing
– 5+ years of product management experience and expertise in managing multiple stakeholders
– Managed the release of a brand new product line
– Experience developing a product roadmap
– Experience mentoring junior colleagues
Nice to Have:
– Startup experience
– Experience as a key participant in defining and prioritizing a firm-wide product roadmap
– Mobile device product development experience
– Experience working in the social good sector
About Catchafire
Catchafire is a leading social impact startup with a mission to provide talented individuals with meaningful pro-bono experiences in order to build capacity for social good organizations.
Founded five years ago, Catchafire is a team of highly motivated individuals out to disrupt “giving” as we know it. Catchafire seeks to help people volunteer to their highest and best use, while reestablishing and reinvigorating the way we volunteer.
Catchafire’s culture is a unique blend of social enterprise, tech startup, and classroom. We hire people who at their core are social entrepreneurs, and we believe that every individual who joins Catchafire has the power to be an incredible and large-scale changemaker.
We are paving the way for a new type of business model, one that demonstrates that you can focus on social mission and build a successful business at the same time. We are at the intersection of many disparate worlds (for-profit and nonprofit; purpose and business; talent development and corporate social responsibility), and we seek to break down the barriers between these silos to allow social good and community, talent and resources to flow more freely.