Product People is the premier destination for Product Management services in Europe. We cover parental leaves, discover/deliver great products, and accelerate transformation by acting as bar-raising pacesetters. Our in-house recruitment process has a 0.3% acceptance rate.

We empower our Product community of 60,000 members to share knowledge generously whilst managing the unglamorous hands-on work of a Product/Program Manager or Product Ops, on an interim/fractional basis (3-12 months). We onboard fast, align teams, and deliver outcomes. Selected clients include Amazon, eBay, Miro, FreeNow by Lyft, DeepL, and the World Health Organization.

About the Role

• Make Product People a category-defining company in the consulting space. When people think of ride-sharing they think of Uber; for LLMs, it’s Claude/ChatGPT. For Product, Growth Interim/Fractional support we want Product People to be top of mind. You’ll own initiatives that get us there: playbooks, knowledge sharing, networking, growth automation, etc.

• Serve as an Interim Product Manager in mostly post-product market-fit digital-first companies ranging from series B to publicly listed. Some are category leaders and/or leverage the latest tech trends. Others need help getting there. You’ll be driving complex cross-functional initiatives in B2C or B2B products. It can be anything and everything.

• Solve for the clients AND our company. Prioritize ruthlessly. Make an incredible impact, bring clarity in chaos, execute flawlessly and fast. Manage three parallel streams internally and externally. You are good at both unglamorous hands-on work and strategy. You understand how deep or wide to go, plus when that’s the case and when it’s not.

• Communicate a compelling narrative about the product. And each existing or potential feature/capability you manage: 'What job/problem does it solve?', 'For whom?', 'How big is the problem/market?', 'What is success?' and why solving this matters in the first place. Understand, share, and shape strategic business context with the client’s leadership team.

• Effectively manage various groups consisting of strong personalities. Adapt to their communication preferences. Integrate quickly and feel part of any team in days, not weeks. People love working with you and would work with you again despite you saying “no” to them a lot.  Always come off as friendly, helpful, and accommodating, even when pushing back on irrational demands.

• Coach the next generation. Train, mentor, and delegate relentlessly to help our Associate Product Managers strengthen their skills. Manage 1-6 people depending on tenure, performance, and career ambitions. Collaborate with 2-3 colleagues daily. Break down complex initiatives into manageable, quantifiable work for the team. We use the teaching hospital method (watch, do it yourself under supervision, teach others to do it).

• Rinse and repeat. Go on a new mission with a new client or in a new team, new domain, new product, or initiative every 3-6 months. Continue sharpening your edge and actively helping our internal initiatives.

About You

• You like Fixing the Mess in a High-ownership, High-visibility Role. Like Marie Kondo, we come in when there’s a mess. Many people go see a doctor too late; so many clients bring external support when there’s already significant damage. You’re unfazed by that and create structure from chaos. You find these adventures exciting and make this the time of your life.

• Optimism as an Operating System. You have a high-happiness resting point. You handle high-pressure situations and difficult people with timely, and composed reactions. Our job is “humans all the way down”. No client wants to bring in a pessimistic, cynical, or attacking consultant. They expect a politely relentless and cheerful style.

• Driven, Collaborative, Kind and Direct. People would leave higher-paying jobs to work with you again. You give constructive and immediate feedback to help others grow, accept it graciously and and adapt quickly. Clients you worked with recommend us to others and come back to work with us again.

• Context Switching Ninja. You learn fast and make quick and solid decisions with incomplete info. We won’t ever have all our clients' context on internal priorities and politics. You can deep dive with engineers, and then switch to explain the business angle to senior leadership.

• Commercial Leadership. You understand how companies make money and grow, know which levers to pull with a product mindset, and are pragmatic and outcome-oriented.

Compensation

Your salary is determined by the Level (L1-L8) set during the recruitment process, the Location Cluster your country of tax residence is in and tenure within the role. We also have Quarterly Bonuses (Uncapped) and Yearly Profit Participation Pool. For example all PMs (L4) in Location Cluster 2 (Greece, Croatia, etc) will have the same salary and it will be different that of L4s in Location Cluster 1 (Germany, Sweden, etc). See our transparent salaries.

What Makes Us Special

• Accelerate your personal and career growth. 10x your learning and networking opportunities by being exposed to multiple companies and teams each year. We give timely, candid, and direct feedback and expect you to do the same. We run 4-month performance reviews for each person. This helps us improve the team, maintain quality of service, and proactively promote people who show sustained performance at the next level.

• Amazing culture, structured onboarding and support network. We have a supportive, high-performance, and open culture. It starts with onboarding you well. We hire and retain the best people living our values while counseling to leave those happier elsewhere. We share knowledge generously while being excellent and candid with each other. Our onboarding guide contains everything you need, and if you need more, there’s our #help channel! We proactively share our learning with each other through sharing sessions and help each other resolve complex situations through peer mentoring.

• Work remotely. Our day to day work happens distributed-first. But we sometime visit the client’s office to meet the team during kick-off, hosting workshops or networking. And we expect you to work mainly from within your location of tax residence and be available for short notice trips to attend networking events or client meetings. We operate in Central European Time 08:30-18:00 with breaks, and our team values fast collaboration. We accommodate a maximum time difference of +3.5 hours and -2 hours. Please consider this when applying for the position.

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Before you apply, note that we assign a higher ranking to the questionnaire below than CVs. And appreciated candidates that write well thought of and concise.