Product/Project Manager (AI Startup)

Product & Project Manager (AI Startup) 

Location: Remote, PST Time Zone (6 AM - 2 PM PST)

Minimum Qualifications (Experience & Background)

• 5+ years leading complex software or AI/ML projects end-to-end; cross-functional teams (≈8+ people).
• Mastery of Jira / Linear / Trello (workflows, automations, dashboards, SLAs).
• Technical literacy: can parse specs and light code (Python / TypeScript), Git, APIs.
• Familiar with cloud & CI/CD (AWS/GCP/Azure basics; GitHub/GitLab pipelines).
• Strong communicator (exec updates, PRDs/RFCs, stakeholder alignment).
• Formal grounding in Agile/Scrum/Kanban practices.
• AI tooling (daily driver): Power-user of ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini for writing/specs, reviews, activity planning, etc.
   

Core Responsibility Areas

1) Product Strategy & Roadmap

• Translate company vision into roadmap, quarterly and weekly OKRs, and clear outcomes.
• Break initiatives into epics/stories with INVEST acceptance criteria.
• Prioritize with data (RICE/WSJF/ROI); articulate trade-offs and “build vs. buy vs. partner.”

2) Delivery & Agile Program Management

• Own sprint cadence: planning, stand-ups, demos, retros; drive continuous improvement.
• Maintain single, accurate plans of record; track velocity, capacity, burndown, throughput.
• Proactively manage dependencies, scope, and risks; unblock teams fast.
• In Jira/Linear/Trello: create and own the entire backlog—epics/stories/tasks with effort estimates, crisp descriptions, and acceptance criteria—link PRDs/specs to tickets, and keep workflows/dashboards up to date.

3) Cross-Functional Leadership

• Orchestrate engineering, research/ML, data, design, QA, and GTM to land releases on time.
• Facilitate design reviews, architecture checkpoints, QA sign-offs.
• Coach teams on agile hygiene, crisp writing, and decision quality.

4) Data, Metrics & Experimentation

• Define success metrics (adoption, retention, revenue/efficiency impact).
• Plan and analyze A/B tests; maintain guardrail metrics.
• Build delivery & impact dashboards for ICs and execs.

5) AI/ML & Data Lifecycle

• Partner on model KPIs (precision/recall, latency, drift, cost).
• Oversee dataset curation & labeling/annotation quality gates.
• Manage training/inference pipelines, versioning, lineage, governance.
• Implement/model lifecycle with MLflow / W&B / Kubeflow / SageMaker (or equivalents).

6) Quality, Testing & Release Management

• Define SDLC: DoR/DoD, code review standards, QA entry/exit.
• Own releases: branching, tagging, UAT, staged rollouts, rollback plans.
• Establish QA strategy (manual + automated); maintain traceability to stories.

7) Process, Tooling & Documentation

• Evolve workflows; select & integrate tools (feature flags, analytics, error tracking).
• Keep a source of truth (Notion/Confluence): PRDs, specs, RFCs, runbooks, onboarding.
• Drive down doc/bug/tech debt with scheduled capacity.

8) Security, Privacy & Compliance

• Embed security & privacy by default; coordinate SOC 2 / ISO 27001 / GDPR/CCPA tasks.
• Define SLOs, error budgets, and observability (alerts, logs, traces).

9) Customer, Pilot & GTM Alignment

• Convert customer input into prioritized backlog; close the feedback loop.
• Lead enterprise pilots: scope, timeline, success criteria, reporting.
• Enable GTM: provide playbooks, demos, FAQs; manage breaking-change comms.

10) Operations, Vendors & Budget

• Plan capacity/budgets across people, compute, storage, LLm models, APIs, and other vendors.
• Own SOWs, renewals, SLAs; compare pricing and manage relationships.
• Coordinate edge/IoT/camera deployments; handle field rollbacks & hotfixes.

11) Risk, Reliability & Incident Management

• Maintain a risk register; pre-plan mitigations and contingencies.
• Run incident triage/escalations and blameless post-mortems with follow-through.
• Own customer-facing status and delivery health signals.

12) Communication & Executive Reporting

• Write clear decision memos and executive summaries.
• Present status, risks, and asks with sharp narrative & visuals.
• Standardize intake and prioritization cadences (roadmap reviews, beta cohorts, NPS/CSAT).

Skills & Tools

Product & Agile

• Roadmapping (Jira Advanced Roadmaps, Linear Roadmaps), story mapping, user journeys.
• Prioritization frameworks: RICE, WSJF, Cost of Delay, MoSCoW.

Documentation & Comms

• Notion / Confluence, PRDs, RFCs, sequence diagrams, RACI, comms plans, release notes.

Analytics & Experimentation

• Amplitude / Mixpanel, Looker/Metabase; funnels, cohorts, retention, LTV/CAC.
• Experiment design, basic power analysis, guardrail metrics.

APIs & Data

• OpenAPI/Swagger, REST/GraphQL conventions; Postman/Insomnia.
• Data contracts, schema evolution, Miro, event tracking.

ML/MLOps & CV Literacy

• MLflow, W&B, Kubeflow, SageMaker, feature stores.
• Evaluation & monitoring (drift, bias, cost); CV concepts (detection/segmentation, OCR).

Cloud & DevOps

• AWS/GCP/Azure basics; containers; CI/CD with GitHub/GitLab; feature flags.

Observability & Reliability

• Datadog / Prometheus / Grafana / Sentry; logs/metrics/traces; SLOs/error budgets.

Quality Engineering

• Test strategy, automation plans, UAT orchestration, traceability matrices.

Design Collaboration

• Figma, component libraries, design tokens, accessibility fundamentals.

Finance & Vendor

• Unit economics for AI (training vs. inference), budget tracking, SOWs/SLAs, negotiation support.

Change & Release

• Phased rollouts, canaries, migrations, versioning, deprecation policies.

Field Ops (if relevant)

• Site checklists, RMA loops, hardware pilot coordination.

Technical Fluency

• SQL for analysis; basic Python/TypeScript for scripts and reading code.

People & Org

• Capacity planning, hiring rubrics, onboarding playbooks, mentoring ICs.

Aptitudes & Behaviors Mindset

• Owner mentality and customer obsession; outcomes over output.
• Systems thinking; optimizes end-to-end flows, not local maxima.
• High judgment balancing speed vs. safety; knows when to prototype vs. harden.

Execution

• Ruthless prioritization; says “no” well with data.
• Calm under pressure; separates urgent from important; steady in incidents.
• Follow-through; closes loops and ships value predictably.

Communication & Leadership

• Clarity machine: crisp writing and concise narratives for any audience.
• Collaborative challenger: invites dissent, resolves conflict quickly, commits once decided.
• Teaching mindset: levels up teammates; leaves processes better than found.

Quality & Ethics

• High bar for UX polish and maintainability.
• Metrics-driven learning; embraces experiments and retros.

• Ethical compass: considers fairness, privacy, and potential misuse up front.

   

Availability & Work Cadence

• Schedule: PST Time Zone (6 AM - 14 PM PST)
• Responsiveness: 24/7 availability for critical issues (incidents, customer escalations, major launches).
• On-call: Participate in an always-on rotation; triage P0s quickly and drive to resolution.
• Time zones: Maintain US Time Zone.
• Weekends/holidays: Expected support during releases or urgent customer needs; plan recovery time accordingly.
• Comms: Fast responses on Slack/Email/Whatsapp; keep status pages and stakeholders updated in real time.
• Hygiene: Calendar visibility, clear focus blocks, reachable by phone for P0 emergencies.
• Work with Time Tracker