Product Manager, General (NYC)

Job Description

Databases are the beating heart of every business in the world.

Cockroach Labs is the team behind CockroachDB, an open-source, distributed SQL database. We aim to build infrastructure that keeps pace with the world, so developers can focus on what matters most: building the best products. Join us on our mission to Make Data Easy. Are you ready to aim high and build to last?

About the Role

We are looking for an experienced and entrepreneurial Product Manager to help us define and drive the product roadmap.

You Will

• Discover and prioritize the biggest problems developers and operators have adopting CockroachDB and running it in production.
• Work with Engineering, Design, and Documentation to come up with cloud-native solutions, using quantitative and qualitative data to iterate on them until they delight our customers.
• Drive adoption of our solutions by working with marketing and other departments to highlight differentiated workflows among developers, operators, and architects.

You Have

• A STEM degree and/or first-hand experience working with production distributed systems.
• Experience working with engineering to prototype and iterate on features to improve an end-to-end user journey or workflow in the context of a product strategy.
• The ability to write comprehensive user stories that motivate and guide engineering efforts without overconstraining them.
• The ability to communicate the unique value proposition of your product area to support Marketing and Sales teams. You will be expected to periodically produce content to drive adoption and awareness of particular features.
• Excellent writing skills; our strategic product meetings are based on docs rather than decks.
• A collaborative nature and are an enthusiastic, amiable, and personable teammate, open to partnering with all other functions in the company.
• 2-3 years of PM experience.

The Expectations

In your first 30 days, you will go through our CockroachUniversity training program and spend time getting familiar with the specific developer and industry problems your team is solving. You’ll work with the PM lead for your area and review your backlog, get up to speed on in-flight features, and learn how to understand feature adoption using our analytics platform. You’ll also build relationships with the tech leads, other product managers, and members of the broader organization that you’ll be working with day-to-day. You and the Chief Product Officer will have the first of many long-term career planning conversations to understand your goals and how Cockroach Labs can best help you achieve them.

In your first 60 days, you will work with the Product Management lead in your area to drive monthly product-market-fit meetings, which require you to summarize your team’s progress towards our OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) and synthesize what you are hearing from customers and internal stakeholders like Sales Engineering. You will start to vet new feature requests and add them to the backlog.

After 3 months, you will be fully integrated into the team. You'll identify, research, and test solutions to problems. You will analyze product data from alpha releases to determine where to focus our efforts to create the most impact and start to understand how the user journeys in your area differ between self-hosted and cloud CockroachDB deployments. There are countless opportunities for us to invest in, and you will be responsible for prioritizing the ones that will exceed our customers’ expectations while generating a competitive advantage over the long term. We want our users to have a phenomenal experience using CockroachDB and that requires excellent products built by you and your team.

The Team

Initially reporting to Nate Stewart, Chief Product Officer

Nate is responsible for the overall product strategy and the activities we take to guide Cockroach Labs to product-market-fit. As a former engineer, Nate has seen how the challenges of working with data in unreliable, distributed environments often distract developers from building great things. Nate joined Cockroach Labs to help companies avoid that pain once and for all. When he’s not at work, Nate can be found spending time with his family, reading a book from his Goodreads queue, or trying to remove the rust from his tennis game.

Our Benefits

• 100% health insurance coverage (for you and your dependents!)
• Paid parental leave (with baby bucks)
• Flex Fridays
• Flexible time off & flexible hours
• Education reimbursement
• Relocation support

Cockroach Labs is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer building a diverse and inclusive workforce. If you need additional accommodations to feel comfortable during your interview process, please email us at [email protected].