Product Manager

At Product People, we're on a mission to help companies discover and deliver great products. Faster. We empower our 14,000+ people Product Management community to share knowledge generously whilst managing all the unglamorous hands-on work of a PM on an interim basis (3+ months). We onboard fast, align teams, and deliver outcomes. Our clients include Zalando, Tier, Blinkist, and others. **About the Role**: - **Serve as an Interim Product Manager or Product Lead**: Our clients engage us at various stages of their growth (series B to publicly listed) and product life cycle. This role takes you from scaling products or teams to driving complex initiatives. You could go from helping a scale-up set and reach its quarterly KPIs, to steering a pivot, successfully navigating "how the product is done" at a publicly listed company, or shaping Product Management/ Product Operations capabilities at a hyper-growth. - **Solve hard problems.** Make high-impact product and business decisions that benefit both the client and our company. This is both exciting and challenging. Manage discovery and/or delivery for several parallel initiatives (internal and external). Depending on the setup, it may involve other Product, Program, and/or Project Managers. - **Partner with clients and stakeholders.** Always come off as friendly, helpful, and accommodating even when pushing back on irrational demands. Handle people and high-pressure situations with timely and candid reactions. Gracefully manage stakeholders that are pushing you to execute initiatives that may hurt them. Align on building the right things. Tell compelling fact-based stories in a digestible way. - **Make the clients and our team happy.** Ideally, the clients renew our contracts and/or get more Product People team members in to support them. Achieve this while communicating openly, being nice, collaborative, and supportive to the Associate Product Managers (L2-L3) working with you. - **OODA (Observe Orient Decide Act) loops fast**. In most cases, we won't have all the context our clients have on internal priorities and politics. Consequently, there are bound to be many occasions where we are caught completely by surprise (especially since clients are not always the most organized themselves). Being able to think quickly, address out-of-the-blue questions, and direction/strategy changes that put you on the spot go a long way, especially in balancing client satisfaction and realistic expectations. - **Train the next generation. **Strive to coach, mentor, and delegate to help Associate Product Managers (L2-L3) grow and strengthen their skills. Manage 1-6 people depending on your tenure, performance reviews, and career ambition/appetite for growth. Collaborate with 1-3 colleagues on clients. We use the teaching hospital approach (watch, do it yourself under supervision, teach) and candid feedback in both directions to help you strengthen your mentoring muscle. - **Learn quickly and level up.** Report to a Group Product Manager (L8) or Senior Product Manager (L6-L7) and benefit from their mentoring. Learn from your peers and their client work. We're growing fast, and you can be eligible for the Group Product Manager (L8) role when hitting internal milestones. - **Network or write.** Further Product People's mission is to help companies discover and deliver great products faster by supporting our free weekly community events, writing about product topics, networking, and sharing knowledge with other Product Managers and Product Leaders. - **Help Product People thrive.** Propose and take ownership of initiatives that make us better as a team or as a company, help us make an impact on the clients faster, help us level up the team, and optimize for our long-term profitability and growth. Our ambition is to build a category-defining company in the product management consulting space. - **Rinse and repeat.** Go on a new mission at a new client or in a new team, new domain, new product, or initiative every 3-6 months. Continue sharpening your edge, and actively helping Product People's internal initiatives. **About You**: - **You like fixing the mess.** Just like Marie Kondo, we are not called up when things are going well. It doesn't come naturally for anyone to bring in externals unless they are in great pain. Just like with illnesses people go to the doctor too late, in Product Management, very few do preventive care. This can be both scary and exciting, people who create structure from chaos find these adventures exciting and have a great time going on client missions with us. - **Highly driven, kind, and supportive**. People would leave higher-paying jobs at bigger companies just to work with you again. Anyone you work with recommends you and Product People to their friends and colleagues for the incredible impact you make. - **Thrive in open communication culture**. We move fast, don't play political games, and don't backchannel. We ask you will be open about your ex