Product Software Planner (Contract)

We're building a multi-tier SaaS platform for sports club management. We're launching with pickleball in the US and expanding globally from there. The architecture is locked, the first have been written, and we need product generalists who can plan more of the platform, faster. This role is a Product Software Planner who can also exercise design judgment and write specifications that a UI/UX designer, backend developer, or frontend developer can pick up and run with. You'll report to our Product Owner and own feature areas from initial research through ready-to-build tickets. Contract, hourly, flexible, remote.

What you'll actually do
You'll own planning work from "we need to figure out this area of the product" to "here's a set of tickets a dev team can pick up tomorrow." That includes:

• Competitive research: Teardowns of adjacent and competing products. What do they do well? Where do they fail? What's the gap we exploit?
• Feature definition: Turning a fuzzy product area into a clear scope, user stories, and trade-offs.
• UI/UX judgment: You have opinions about how software should feel. You can spot when a flow is going to frustrate a user before we build it. You won't own the visual design (we have a UI/UX designer for that), but you'll write the specs they design from.
• Wireframing and flow specification: Whatever fidelity gets the idea across. Box-and-arrow flows, low-fi wireframes, Figma screens, written user journeys. Enough for our UI/UX designer to take it from there.
• Ticket breakdown: Writing the actual tickets. Acceptance criteria. Edge cases. Dependencies. Basically, the kind of tickets engineers don't have to ask follow-up questions about. There's already a pre-defined template and flow for this.
• Decisions: You can make a call, defend it, and change your mind when the evidence says otherwise.

Who we're looking for

• 3+ years working as a Product Planner, Product Manager, Product Owner, or hybrid generalist at a SaaS company
• Portfolio of planning artifacts: not just shipped features, but the specs, flows, and tickets you wrote to get there
• Comfortable writing in detail. This role is heavy on the written word.
• Strong opinions, loosely held. You can argue your position and also move forward when overruled.
• Fluent with modern tooling: GitHub, markdown-based planning, GitHub Issues and/or Jira-style tickets
• Technical fluency: comfortable reading database schemas, API contracts, and architecture docs without needing translation
• Able to work independently and flag risks proactively instead of surfacing them when it's too late

Nice to have

• SaaS experience in B2B2C or multi-tenant platforms (clubs, franchises, marketplaces)
• Sports / fitness / community software background
• Experience writing planning docs that senior developers can execute on
• Comfort with regulatory edge cases (COPPA, GDPR, payment compliance)
• Figma fluency for lightweight wireframing (not required, your specs can be in any format that communicates clearly)

About Courtnexa

• Panama-incorporated, remote team
• Small founding team: Owner, CTO (23+ years software engineering), Product Owner, Development team (8 devs), UI/UX designer, and growing
• Pre-launch, pre-revenue, architecture locked and first tickets in motion
• Targeting US first, then global expansion (global regulatory research already done)
• Real product, real roadmap, real path to revenue. Not a concept on a slide deck.

How we work (read this carefully)

• Planning-first discipline. We lock decisions before we build. Open questions get tracked and resolved, not hand-waved.
• Direct communication. We stress-test ideas hard. If your work gets pushed back on, it's because we want it to be bulletproof, not because we don't respect you. We expect the same treatment back.
• Iterative, not perfectionist. Ship the v1 doc, review it, sharpen it. Nobody gets it right on draft one.
• Async-friendly. Most work happens in writing, in our planning repository, on a schedule you control. Meetings exist but aren't the default.

If you need frequent video calls or gentle feedback to do your best work, we're probably not a fit. If you want to operate at senior scope with clear ownership and a small team that will push your thinking, read on.

Hiring process

• Application review
• 45-minute intro call
• NDA signed

How to apply
Send:

• A link to one planning artifact you're proud of (spec, PRD, ticket breakdown, teardown, anything)
• A 2-3 sentence note on what you'd want to learn about Courtnexa before your first engagement
• Your hourly rate and weekly availability