PMing at Metabase is a bit different than elsewhere, in how much we emphasize deep understanding of problems, of the technical realities of the product and the importance of delivering reliably simple and user-aligned software. It rewards intellectual curiosity, customer empathy and systematic thinking and doesn’t focus on strict metric optimization or a ship-ship-ship attitude. We ship, but we do it well.
Responsibilities
- Develop deep knowledge and empathy for users needs in the areas they tackle. This involves reviewing existing issues, tickets, docs, engaging in lots of interviews and evaluating quantitative data.
- Understand the underlying mechanics of the product at a technical level. They don’t need to read/write code, but need to have the curiosity and ability to over time understand how things work and develop instincts for what’s easy/hard.
- Develop strategies for solving clusters of users needs in thoughtful ways, ultimately delivering product docs which frame needs in actionable ways for designers and engineers.
- Steward projects forward, helping keep focus, momentum, and continuously re-evaluating scope, with flexibility and appreciation for technical constraints and UX considerations.
- Follow-up on the outcomes of projects they ship, quantitatively and qualitatively.
- Collaborate with the rest of the team, consistently seeking and providing feedback, as well as pitching ideas for how to advance the product.
And specifically to:
- Identify opportunities for leveraging ML/LLMs in the product through a mix of strong intuition for use case/solution matches and focused, benchmark-centric experimentation.
- Nurture the development of AI projects with particularly strong quantified success criteria, like defining benchmark expectations, sourcing benchmark sample data, gauging likely plateaus for improvement, etc.
- Elevate the broader PM team’s knowledge of how to ship and iterate upon LLM features.
Responsibilities don’t include:
- Managing people, herding cats, writing code, making mocks, using JIRA.
About You
- Excited to belly flop into the non-deterministic and reliably unpredictable world of LLM-backed projects.
- Able and interested in staying up-to-date with developments in the world of LLMs and adjacent technologies, with a bias towards tinkering on your own.
- A thorough thinker, able to be both diligent with details but systematic to see the big picture.
- Appreciative of clean but powerful user experiences (and the hard work their require).
- Able to keep a vision in mind, but break the path to it into small, doable, valuable steps.
- Motivated to work asynchronously in a global team, and with the written communication chops to do it effectively.
- More interested in the Product than the Management part of Product Management.
Skills and experience
- 3+ years shipping ML products as part of a Product+Eng team, with good understanding of the underlying mechanisms (you can’t just lob requirements over the fence and hope for good things, you need to understand the details).
- 5+ years as a PM in a technical environment (this is not a role for junior PMs), shipping user-facing software (not just infra). Preference for the analytics/databases/developer tools space, but you can have built any sort of product as long as it had some real technical complexity.
- Demonstrable experience leveraging LLMs as building blocks in complex workflows (either professionally or in personal projects), with strong understanding of underlying mechanics (aka no simple prompt wrappers).
- Driven and experienced in helping others continuously deliver work through influence, not authority.
Skills you don't need:
- up-to-date coding skills, customer management, cloud infra knowledge, horse whispering.
