Smith.ai Senior Product Manager Job Description

ABOUT THIS ROLE

Building a boat isn’t about weaving canvas, forging nails, or reading the sky. It’s about giving a shared taste for the sea, by the light of which you will see nothing contradictory but rather a community of love.

(the real St. Euxpery quote)

Our boat is made of titanium and duct tape, on fire all the time, leaking, with ramjets attached to it, and a bunch of people doing their best work, building bonds together, as it hurdles through the outer edges of the galaxy.

As a Senior Product Manager, you will play a crucial role in driving the success of our products. We are hiring product managers across our product lines so we are looking for generalists with prior experience operating in fast-moving early stage startups. You will have the opportunity to make a significant impact by leading the development, launch, and enhancement of our virtual receptionist, outbound call, chat, internal tooling, and AI products in a fast-paced, high-growth environment.

ABOUT YOU

Does this sound like you?

• Coachable. Really. You need to know yourself. If it’s not you right now in life, that’s totally ok! Stop here, make some mistakes, rewire your brain, fail hard, and get back in touch.
  
• Can visualize and describe complex systems. You can see how things will play out.
  
• Engineering-minded in any way, regardless of technical skill in computer science
  
• Business-minded, with either an MBA or experience handling difficult business decisions
  
• People would describe you as working behind the scenes to help them succeed rather than putting your name on the marquee.
  
• Has been fired or critically humbled in any meaningful, introspective way
  
• Has found yourself solely responsible for something that will fail if you slack. And you didn’t slack, and it didn’t fail.
  
• You’re a good writer & storyteller, and can sell people on your ideas through written and visual presentation. (Or other people have told you that you are.)
  
• Ready to dive right in, just doing stuff that needs to be done — our way — mastering what’s going on, figuring out how you can improve how we work and what comes next, which may include hiring more people to help your vision.
  
  
  • ️ This specifically means we’re not looking for people who want to join and right away tell us how it was done at their company, or how they have “their way” of doing it. Even if how we are doing it is so aggravating you want to reach out and slap us. We expect you to become a student of our process before providing feedback.

Good? (If not, thanks for reading!) Then let’s continue. You can hang with a startup. Nothing about hustle culture, long hours, horrible work-life balance, etc. It’s about a specific mentality you’ll bring to our team.

There are a lot of words here. If you’re going to spend a few years or more committing headspace, time, and energy to something, detail matters.

ABOUT SMITH.AI

You’re a product person who thinks in systems. So are we.

Our leadership comes from everyday tech company names and startups, just taking the good parts of where they’ve been.

Before Smith.ai, Justin (CXO and co-founder) most famously designed & led PM for an app frequently heralded as a pivot point in mobile UX, Mint.com for iOS, and lots of other good things. Aaron (CEO and co-founder) founded RedBeacon, a service-oriented tech platform that Home Depot acquired so everyday customers can have the things they buy installed at checkout.

We’ve always done things with the everyday, non-technical person in mind. We’re systems people at heart.

We’re not Silicon Valley hype. We don’t spend time and money trying to make other startups think we are cool. Instead we make our users happy, which we’ve been doing since 2016, and the acceleration really started in 2018 when high value small businesses (e.g., law firms) realized they could drastically increase revenue with us.

We’re remote, and it’s baked into the culture. Our engineers are mostly in Spain, our designers are in New Zealand and Sweden, we have people from Mexico to Australia, and we had one guy in a sprinter — I literally have no idea where he is right now. We don’t care where you live, as long as your core work hours intersect with most people, about 10 AM – 4 PM PST. We pay a salary consistent with the role, not with the location, and that’s helped us build a wider, more diverse team (but there’s still a lot of work to do there).

Ok, so what do we do? Do you care about this area?

We use humans + AI to qualify leads for Small & Medium Businesses, a.k.a. “SMB” (law firms, home contractors, IT consultants, marketing agencies, and more), and our customers love us. It’s a huge market — there are 30MM SMB in the US alone. We’re growing almost faster than we can handle right now, which is why we need you.

Our “human in the loop” (Human + AI) system handles business’ inbound & outbound communication, with funnels optimized for their industry and goals. The results are more qualified leads booked on their calendars, more time back in their day, and more success to their business. We have a culture of ruthless prioritization, honest communication, and respect. We build stuff very, very quickly with lots of customer input, and we subscribe to Eames’ “Innovate as a last resort.”

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Ship Product - Take stewardship of an assigned product or feature and drive it through the development cycle, ensuring timely delivery and high-quality execution. Gather requirements, define scope, project manage, and guide the product through ideation, design, development, and testing phases to successful launch.
• Contribute to Roadmap Development - Collaborate with key stakeholders, including executives, product leaders, and engineering teams, to contribute to the development and refinement of the product roadmap.
• Business Analysis for Emerging Opportunities - Conduct in-depth business analysis to identify emerging market opportunities, customer needs, and competitive landscape. Evaluate market trends, customer feedback, and industry insights to uncover potential areas for product expansion, differentiation, or improvement. Provide recommendations and insights to inform decision-making and guide future product development efforts.
• Prioritization and Tradeoffs of Existing Backlog - Assess the existing product backlog, working closely with cross-functional teams, to identify priorities, dependencies, and tradeoffs. Streamline and optimize the backlog to maximize product development efficiency and impact.

DESIRED TRAITS

• Operating Range - You have a naturally high ability to account for a vast number of details and parse multiple layers of abstraction. You are comfortable flying at 50 ft or at 5000 ft, and you take pride in your judgment on when to do each.
• Doer - You have a high bias for action. You aren’t afraid to roll up their sleeves and wade through the muck to uncover the right answers.
• Learning machine - You consume and distill new information voraciously, climbing learning curves with dizzying speed. We should feel like we would have a hard time keeping up with you and be compelled to level up our game as a consequence.
• Systems Thinker - You can reason from First Principles to parse signal from noise, extrapolate the underlying pattern, identify the sensitive inputs & weightings and generalize to other contexts.
• Foresight - You are able to balance the needs of the present without jeopardizing or constraining optionality in the future. You can play out the multi-round consequences of available paths or tactics, take the long-term view and do not make a habit of cutting corners.
• High Trajectory - You are pursuing personal and professional growth as a top reason for changing jobs. You actively seek coaching and working environments that imprint you with new skills and abilities to level up.
• Humility - You are comfortable enough to know when to say “I don’t know”. You share credit with the team when things go well and volunteer to own the blame when something goes wrong in your corner of the kitchen.

EXPERIENCE

• Must Have
  • Seasoned product professional - 5+ years of experience learning about users, identifying solutions to their problems, and delivering value to them.
  • Experience operating at a startup - 3+ years of experience building and shipping product in startup (Seed thru Series B) environments; understands how to operate in an environment of uncertainty and possesses malleability to pivot gracefully.
  • Full product lifecycle experience - Prior experience managing technical software products from ideation through launch.
  • Stellar user research chops - You are not afraid to dig in and unearth the underlying causal mechanisms that drive adoption, usage & retention. Well-versed in ethnography, generative interviews, evaluative interviews, & A/B testing.
  • A strong eye for user experience - Must be able to communicate using design tools like Sketch, Figma, or the Adobe Suite.
  • Working with cross functional teams - experience working with not only design and engineering teams, but also sales, marketing, legal, and customer service teams
  • Analytical skills - Experience using analytical skills to gather, surface, and interpret user data to help drive decision making.
  • Excellent verbal and written communication skills - especially in creating detailed, crisp business requirements, functional requirements and user stories that can be used to create product specifications and architecture for each product.

• Nice to Have
  • Strong business acumen - especially familiarity with software-as-a-service(SaaS) products supporting small and midsize businesses(SMBs).
  • Previous experience working as a product manager in the following industries: SaaS, ML/AI, CRM, Legal Tech, Telephony, Messaging Tech, Sales and Internal Tools.
  • Massive plus if you have trained your own ML model.

HIRING PROCESS

Here is a quick glimpse of our hiring process:

• Resume screening - Your resume will be reviewed by a member of the product team.
• Introductory phone call - 30 minute phone call with someone on the product team to talk about your background and experience, as well as answer any questions you may have
• Candidate exercise - The exercise will be a 1-hour session conducted live with members of the product team. There will NOT be any homework/pre-work required.
• Interview with hiring manager - 30 minute interview with Travis, Smith.ai’s Head of Product.
• Interview with team - 30 minute interviews with 2-5 peers from Product and other related orgs
• Offer - We will work with you to figure out compensation, terms and start date.

We are an equal opportunity employer and believe diversity makes teams better and that discrimination based on race, gender, or anything else is self-defeating.

This is a full-time position with a base salary that ranges between $120,000 - $160,000 per year. In addition to salary, you are eligible for equity and a competitive benefits package that includes medical, dental, vision, life insurance, 401k, and PTO.

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