Technical Product Manager

About this role

As a Technical Product Manager, you’ll play a key role in the success of the most technical and complex aspects of the Ably platform, including our core Pub/Sub Channels product. You’ll leverage deep technical and software engineering expertise to transform ideas into reality, uncovering the problems we can solve for our customers and driving product teams to deliver swift solutions whilst maintaining the level of quality and reliability that our customers expect from Ably.

You will be the expert in our market, our product and, most importantly, our users. You’ll also be responsible for the success of your part of the product, and will own the roadmap and strategy for it.

Day to day you will

• Champion a visionary product strategy. You’ll partner with our founders, senior management and engineering leadership to build and maintain a product strategy for your product areas that will help the company to achieve its strategic objectives.
• Advance Ably’s platform. You’ll collaborate with a talented team of engineers to continuously improve our wider platform offering, formulating roadmap initiatives, delivering new features, and solve interesting and challenging problems relating to developer experience, tooling, account and billing management and other common services.
• Experiment and test hypotheses. You'll experiment and cultivate a deep knowledge of customer problems through research, engagement with the developer community, and customer interviews. You will drive initiatives to validate demand and commercial value of new features, and mitigate known product risks.
• Drive exceptional developer experiences. You'll obsess over ensuring that developers have a great experience with Ably - so much so that they talk about us with other developers and compare us to other great developer-first companies.
• Inspire and guide engineering outcomes. You’ll communicate clear problem statements and product/solution requirements to engineering and document them in writing, along with UX wireframes or API scaffolding where appropriate.
• Steward the delivery process. You’ll work closely with our Delivery and Engineering teams, facilitating and contributing to decisions around timelines, trade-offs and how we close gaps in requirements.
• Own commercial outcomes and take new products to market. You’ll work with product marketing and the wider marketing team to deliver go-to-market plans for new products and features. You will drive commercial outcomes for the product(s) you own.

It's important that you have

• Significant previous experience in product management for technical B2B SaaS products, with a track record of driving technical and architectural improvements.
• A background in software engineering and the ability to write code in at least one modern language to build prototypes that use our APIs.
• An understanding of pub/sub and familiarity with distributed systems and event based architectures.
• Strong problem-solving skills and enthusiasm for hard challenges, with the ability to analyze complex situations, identify potential obstacles and determine practical solutions.
• Demonstrable previous experience of roadmap development for a technically complex product.
• A detail-oriented approach to understanding user needs, pain points and behaviors in order to craft exceptional user experiences.
• A hunger for data exploration and a history of using data and analysis to make informed product decisions.
• Experience at a startup or growth-stage company or adaptability to thrive in a fast-paced, agile environment with a focus on rapid iteration.

It would be great, but not essential if you have

• Experience delivering solutions used by developers (developer tools or APIs), or closely related solutions for other technical personas in the software development ecosystem (e.g. DevOps, cloud infrastructure etc.).
• Experience defining APIs, writing documentation and building prototypes.