Product Manager

*Remote | Offices available in Los Angeles & Houston* *Compensation: $110k - 125k plus 15% bonus target*This isn't your typical job ad, and we're not looking for your typical product manager. Interested? Let's dig in.

1️⃣ Who We Are

GMV is a multinational group with global presence in different high-tech sectors. In the US, our company was originally founded as Syncromatics in 2006 and joined GMV Global in 2015. We specialize in all things technical for public transit systems. This means we design, manufacture, and manage all kinds of different products and features, including driver interfaces, dispatch communications, passenger counters, announcers, GPS tracking, and reporting & data analytics. It also means we build real-time information systems for riders, including apps and digital signage found at bus stops. We have relationships with Apple Maps, Google Maps, Transit app, and our work goes out to millions of riders on those platforms. Our product is like air traffic control, but for buses. There are a mix of hardware and software products in this role. We hope this excites you!

Our team in the US has approximately 70 people, with 20 in the product/engineering department. It’s the best of both worlds: small company feel with big company support. To learn more about the US-based intelligent transportation systems division of GMV, visit www.gmvtransit.com.

***2️⃣ We're here to serve customers***Our customers are public transit operators. Their customers are the transit riding public, which includes people from all walks of life. Our job is to serve those who make transit work every day. While this isn’t an easy job and we don’t do a lot of handholding, we spend a significant amount of time on onboarding and context in the product team so that you are prepared to deliver value.

If you want to be challenged with growth opportunities in a small team environment with high autonomy and see your work live on thousands of transit buses nationwide, then we are the team for you.

3️⃣ We’re looking for passion

We value people who enjoy being wrong and learning something new about why in the process, who challenge & support their peers, pressing them to be better versions of themselves and up-level the team. We value product managers who are curious, design-savvy, and understand how people operate. We care more about whether you can communicate well, enjoy technology and cities, and can translate complex ideas into simple explanations than whether or not you have professional product management experience, but we hope you’ve been around it at least.

We value people who take ownership and act with good judgment, not because they were told to, but because they see an opportunity to make things better. Initiative matters on our team, as does knowing when to ask and ensure you’re aligned with the broader mission. We’re looking for someone with tons of potential upside, and we are willing to take a risk if we sense that. We’ll get into more specific requirements in the next section, but it’s important to know that we’re not just looking for boxes to be checked.

We value interest in technology, transportation, and non-traditional, wide-ranging backgrounds.

*4️⃣ What this role is about:*We need someone to understand the needs of our customers better than anyone else in the organization and develop both short-term tasks and long-term plans to help us meet those needs. Your job will be to bring products and features to market that expand our user base and stakeholders within existing customers. You should be able to identify where agencies have gaps in their workflows and tooling and how we can effectively fill them.

You should be confident in front of our organization and our management team, backing up your assertions with a positive approach. You need to know when to say “no” to keep us focused and when to say “yes” to the right new ideas.

As a product manager, you’ll sit at the center of everything we do and you’ll need to put together a deep understanding of business context, internal resources, market desires, and user preferences into a clear vision.

You should be willing to travel to learn from our users (assume a short trip every 2 months or so), and to work across every department and function within our company. You will lead a team of engineers without being their direct supervisor, so your people skills are critical, but we don’t want you to be the development project manager and you’re not responsible for their daily work.

You’ll be part marketer, part designer, part tester, and part trainer. You’ll have high responsibility, but also high influence. You’ll go from discussing strategy with our leadership team one minute to writing detailed acceptance criteria in a development ticket the next, or from spending one day riding along with a bus driver in a small town to spending the following presenting at an industry conference with agency leaders from across the country.

To deliver on all that, you should bring most of the following skills and experience:

• Experience working in a scrum process – ours is “scrum-lite” and flexible, but it helps if you’ve worked in this way before.
• Prior use of project management tools – we use Jira, and we’ll teach you our ways, but we want to know that you have used that or similar tools in the past.
• An understanding of transit or urban planning – maybe you’ve relied on the bus for your own commute, maybe you travel the world and use transit across Europe and Asia, maybe you have an urban planning degree. We don’t really care how it came to be, but having an interest in and basic understanding of how transit works is important.
• Public speaking, creative production, design, sales, or marketing experience – our product team also handles marketing and crafts much of our external-facing messaging. You need to be comfortable in front of people in anything from one-on-one interviews to large scale presentations.
• Technical sophistication and understanding – you don’t need to write code, but you need to know what an API is and how to query one.
• Research and data analysis – whether it’s through better user interviews, survey design, or data analysis, we’re looking to improve our usage of data (combined with intuition) in the product decision process, and we want to see that you’ve done some of this before.

*5️⃣ Our commitment, and yours:*We set our team up for success and dedicate a lot of time to onboarding and training. We value internal mobility and advancement and many of us measure our tenure in decades. We're looking for someone with a similar dedication, who expects to be here for at least a few years. We’re not the kind of tech company that people hop to and from, and we’re looking for someone to grow with us over time.

We’d love the chance to show you why this could be the right place for you. *6️⃣ What we offer:*

• Compensation: $110k -125k plus 15% bonus target
• Generous health, dental, vision and voluntary benefits
• 12 weeks paid parental leave after one year of service
• 401k plan with company match
• Flexible hours and remote work (plus an office in Los Angeles or Houston if you want to use it)
• Travel to industry events and customer sites
• A small team environment with big impact

Most of our work happens on Slack, but a few times per year we get together in person to collaborate within and across our teams. Our company is a small one with great culture, and you're going to have fun being a part of it.

Our team is passionate; our product makes a difference. Let us sell you on that. We’ll show you this during the interview process, and we promise you won't be disappointed.

*7️⃣ To apply, you MUST send more than a resume – we need to understand who you are.*We don't need a basic sir or madam cover letter, but we do need to see you taking the application seriously, which means writing a note telling us why this job appeals to you and why you’d be a great fit for us. Tell us about a specific project (work or personal) that you’re particularly proud of and why, why your experience is a good fit for what we’re looking for, and why you’re personally interested in the role.

Most importantly, show us something about you that we can’t get from your resume. We don’t need an AI-summary of your resume and if the letter feels like it was just written by AI, we will ignore it.

To apply:

• Complete the online application.
• Email your note and resume to the hiring manager directly: careers-na [AT] gmv [DOT] com with the subject “Product Manager.”

Later in the process, we do a practical test for all candidates we’re considering hiring. This will take some time, but we will pay you for it.

The letter you write for us will be 10 times more valuable than your resume in getting our attention and, while we can’t reply directly to each one, we promise that our product department leaders (Steve and Sophia) will both read it personally.