Head of Product Management

Job Description

Our everyday digital experiences are in the midst of a realtime revolution. Whether attending an event in a virtual venue, receiving realtime financial information, or monitoring live car performance data – consumers simply expect realtime digital experiences as standard. Ably provides a suite of APIs to build, extend, and deliver powerful digital experiences in realtime for more than 265 million devices across 80 countries each month, supporting organizations like Toyota, Bloomberg, Hubspot and Stripe.

Working at Ably means helping to build the infrastructure and technology that will power and shape the future of the internet. The opportunity in front of us is immense. But we can’t rest yet. And we’d like your help. As Ably enters its next stage of growth, we’re looking for talented and curious individuals to help us build and deliver the platform to power synchronized digital experiences in realtime for one billion devices every week by 2024.

About the Product team

Ably's product organization is focused on delivering amazing Developer Experiences. We start by understanding their organization’s ambitious vision for live and collaborative online experiences. Then, we deliver capabilities that empower development teams (software architects, engineers, etc.) to realize that vision faster, more easily, and in a way that scales to match their success.

This involves deeply technical challenges, but we strive to make it simple for our customers by building on a wealth of experience and broad technology skills across infrastructure, DevOps, security, distributed systems, and much more. If you like finding elegant solutions to hard problems, if you like discovering untapped market opportunities, if you enjoy creating "A-ha" moments that make developers heroes, then you'll love being part of the Ably product team.

About this role

As the Head of Product Management at Ably, you’ll be responsible for the growth and development of a talented team of product managers, and will also roll up your sleeves to contribute personally to finding and delivering innovative solutions to our customer’s problems. You will report to the Chief Product Officer, and will have significant direct influence in defining how we execute as a high-performing product team.

Day to day you will

• Be the architect of the product management team, designing the ideal team composition and defining where we need to grow; as individuals and as a group.
• Help hire new product managers with the right skills and culture fit, and help onboard them so they can contribute meaningfully as quickly as possible.
• Coach the team to ensure that each person is working to their full potential and that working together makes everyone even more successful.
• Identify and help unblock impediments to team members’ success.
• Drive adoption and expansion of product management best practices within the team, including both processes and tools
• Identify the right metrics that indicate a healthy product organization, take ownership of efforts to implement and scale the systems to measure them, and report the results to the company as a whole.
• Help drive product strategy, particularly helping to keep our Pods aligned in efforts that support the overall company goals.
• Be an advocate for the Product Management team across all departments at Ably
• Be an expert in our market by listening to our customers and prospects, keeping an eye on our competitors, connecting to the analyst community, and staying abreast of general trends in developer tools, technologies, and practices.
• Support Go to Market activities as a product expert through activities such as customer briefings, sales enablement training, and marketing content creation.

We’d love to hear from you if you have

• Significant product management experience
• Direct people management experience
• Experience building a commercial IaaS / PaaS / Cloud API product
• Experience delivering solutions used by developers or other customers in the software development ecosystem (e.g. DevOps, APM, Cloud Infrastructure, etc.)
• Knowledge of modern software development lifecycle process and methodologies

It would be nice, but not essential if you have

• Experience working with cross-functional teams (particularly with Agile Pod structure)
• Experience at early to mid-stage venture-backed startups
• Personal experience with software development, and are able to write code (in any modern language) to build prototypes that use our APIs.

What’s it like to work at Ably?

Ably is entering a new phase of growth led by an experienced senior team. You’ll be part of a successful, highly motivated, and extremely collaborative team. We want to work in a company of inclusive people who treat each other well.

To see what life’s like at Ably, check out our careers page at ably.com/careers and read the story of how Ably's core values came to be (ably.com/blog/ably-values).

Ably is a remote-first company and we strongly believe in life before work and encourage our people to find a balance between the two.

We recognize that each person is different and will want to be supported in different ways which is why our benefits (ably.com/ukbenefits) are there to help you focus on your needs today and prepare you for your future.

Amongst other things, we offer a generous holiday allowance, private healthcare and significant learning and development opportunities, and provide access to numerous wellbeing resources. We’re proud to do whatever it takes to care for Ablyans and their future.

Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging at Ably

We believe our differences as individuals is what makes us great. Our people are at the heart of what we do, and we encourage everyone to be their most authentic self at Ably: we see inclusivity and openness as fundamental to creating long-term success as an organization. We encourage applications from all backgrounds regardless of age, disability, gender, sexual orientation, parental status, race, religion, educational background or neurodiversity. Ably has an amazing opportunity ahead of us, and we want anyone to be able to contribute to that opportunity.

If you enjoy working as part of a technology company, value open source, and love solving hard problems - then we’d love to hear from you, regardless of whether you fit the job description exactly or not. If in doubt, drop us an email; we’d be more than happy to give you some advice on your application.