Senior Product Manager

Hi I'm Benji, Co-Founder and CEO of Ashby. I'm looking to hire a Senior Product Manager who will be reporting directly to me.

At Ashby, we believe that great product work is more art than science. We also strongly believe that Engineers should own a lot of work typically done by PMs. Instead of writing detailed PRDs, PMs can focus on product prioritization, product strategy, and ensuring excellent execution. Because of this, product taste and user empathy are among the most important skills we look for in new PMs.

We've built a Product & Engineering team that ships high-quality product at a very high velocity. I want this hire to help us scale our approach as we significantly expand our product footprint (we're happy to share more about new products throughout the interview process).

We've been growing very fast, in large part due to customer love, and are now serving 1,800+ customers. Our customers range from earlier-stage startups to growth-stage and Enterprise companies like OpenAI, Snowflake, and Deel.

The Problem

Our current product offering consists of four major modules: ATS, CRM, Scheduling Automation, and Analytics. From day one we have aimed to build "all-in-one and best-in-class". Doing that with a relatively small team has required us to be smart about creating leverage within our product (via reusable modules), optimizing how our team spends time, and maximizing ownership Engineers can take to own projects without many additional stakeholders.

In addition to building a multi-product foundation from day one, we have also put a lot of focus on allowing for customizability and power user features while keeping Ashby easy to get started with.

We want to continue down this ambitious path in the future and add multiple new products, which means we:

• Are not just building a product, but building a platform.
• Need to find a balance between reusable building blocks and feature-specific behavior.
• Blend enterprise customizability and ease of use.

We also want to continuously delight users. We hear "I never thought one could fall in love with an ATS" quite often, and we want to keep that true for all future products we build.

Your Role

In the long term, you will own the entire roadmap for a large portion of Ashby's existing modules. You will be a significant contributor to our overall product strategy and hugely impact our product velocity and quality.

In the short term, you will collaborate closely with me and focus more on the execution of individual projects as you familiarize yourself with our space, customers, and how we do product at Ashby.

Because we give Engineers a lot of product ownership and autonomy, you can focus on high leverage activities instead of spelling out user stories and managing sprints (we are decidedly low process on Product/Engineering).

Ultimately, you are responsible for picking the right priorities and ensuring excellent execution across both product quality and velocity.

For this role, past or aspiring Founders are likely ideal - but we're excited to evaluate candidates from other backgrounds (Our current PM team consists of a former Engineer, a former Designer, a former Data leader, a former Head of Support, and a former Founder; each have unique strengths that we can map against product areas that are the strongest fit).

You could be a great fit if

• You have an unnatural curiosity and excitement about the end-user and the jobs they do.
• You bring an Engineering mindset to product problems and can think through edge cases and understand how to extend our underlying platform to create leverage.
• You can demonstrate taste - you care about the quality of the products you build and use.
• You're an excellent writer and synthesizer; you bring product knowledge and clarity to the entire organization and enable Engineers with product insights.
• You can build a thesis for prioritization and communicate priorities using a sound strategy that combines principled thinking, research, and data.
• You leverage tools and processes to build operational excellence into your product process.
• You have a strong business sense and understand how product and GTM should collaborate, how your features may be monetized, and how product priorities fit into larger business priorities.

Our Culture

Our culture is motivated by Abhik's (my co-founder and VP Engineering) and my belief that a small, talented team, given the right environment, can build high-quality software fast.

Collaboration is Natural & Communication is Deliberate

Our team consists of lifelong learners who are humble and kind (meet them here). These attributes create an environment where collaboration happens naturally (we filter for it in interviews). We combine this with research, prototyping, and written proposals to see around corners and get feedback from the team across time zones. Focus time is sacred, and individual contributors in Engineering have less than 2 hours of meetings per week (Abhik wrote about it here).

Increase Leverage, not Team Size

We built Ashby with the quality, breadth, and depth that many customers would expect from much larger teams over larger time scales. We've done this through investment in:

• Great tooling. In engineering, for example, our CI/CD takes ~10m, and we deploy at least 5x a day.
• Building blocks to create powerful and customizable products fast. At the core of Ashby is a set of common components (analytics modeling and query language, policy engine, workflow engine, design system) which we are constantly improving. Each usability improvement to a common component cascades throughout our app (short video on it here).

Give Ownership & Autonomy

Abhik and I did our best work as individual contributors when we had a deep understanding of the end-user and the business and ownership over the solution. Our culture reflects this experience: individual contributors, including engineers, own projects end-to-end, from speaking with users to writing product specs to UX design. These are skills that we often don't get to practice, and at Ashby, we provide mentorship to grow them and help from the team where you want it.

Interview Process

1. Intro Call with Benji (Co-Founder and CEO) - 20 mins.
2. Product Experience Deep Dive - 45 mins.
3. Assignment
   • Prepare Assignment Async.
   • Present Results - 60 mins.
4. Final Round Interview - 4 hours
   • Mostly focused on cross-functional Interviews to meet more of the team. This is a critical hire for us and a role that will touch a lot of functions - we want to make sure you'll meet folks you'll be working closely with.

Benefits

• 10-year exercise window for stock options. You shouldn't feel pressure to purchase stock options if you leave Ashby —do it when you feel financially comfortable.
• Unlimited PTO with four weeks recommended per year. Expect "Vacation?" in our one-on-one agenda until you start taking it.
• Twelve weeks of fully paid family leave in the US. We plan to expand this to employees in other countries as situations arise.
• Generous equipment, software, and office furniture budget. Get what you need to be happy and productive
• $100/month education budget with more expensive items (like conferences) covered with manager approval.
• If you're in the US, top-notch health insurance for you and your dependents with all premiums covered by us.

Ashby's success hinges on hiring great people and creating an environment where we can be happy, feel challenged, and do our best work. We're being deliberate about building that environment from the ground up. I hope that excites you enough to apply.

Ashby provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, genetics, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. We are committed to a diverse and inclusive workforce and welcome people from all backgrounds, experiences, perspectives, and abilities.

To request reasonable accommodations, please contact hiring@ashbyhq.com.