Applications for this role have now closed. Please see our jobs page for our open positions.
Salary range: $90,000 – $105,000 per year
Location: Remote (US)
Reports to: Chief Product Officer
The 19th’s product team is a multidisciplinary group of people working to create ways for people to experience and support The 19th’s journalism. We believe in the power of audience-centered development, where real people’s specific needs and wants inspire our work to meet business goals, as well as the power of brand and design to build trust between readers and our journalism and staff.
We are hiring a product operations manager to improve and standardize product development processes and foster alignment around product goals and initiatives. You will be responsible for giving the team the tools they need to be strategic and effective, shared processes for collaboration, and facilitating communication across the organization about team priorities and active initiatives. The product operations manager is responsible for improving the how, and will rely closely on product leadership to understand the what and the why.
Responsibilities include:
- Identify operational challenges impacting product development and design solutions that are flexible to the needs of different skill sets and teams.
- Model solutions to operational challenges and scale impact by teaching others to leverage them for their own projects and daily work.
- Automate systems by collaborating with the technology team or by using automation tools such as Zapier.
- Define clear metrics of success for systems, track how it’s going and iterate with input from the team.
- Lead team knowledge management, including our documentation, templates and best practices.
- Learn what’s important to our collaborators as well as their ongoing information needs.
- Keep collaborators informed of product and audience insights in a way that is accessible and actionable to their individual contexts.
- Facilitate group conversations and brainstorms. Listen actively to find ways to move conversations forward and wrap up with clear next steps and action items.
- Be the team’s eyes and ears for cross-departmental work and decisions that may impact product development.
- Support the Chief Product Officer in creating consistency in how new projects are taken up and predictability in the cadence of decision-making.
- Build systems around written and verbal communication that can scale overtime.
- Collaborate with operations leads in other departments to find opportunities that will enable everyone to work better together.
Early projects may include:
- Develop, model and train people on a standard project management process that can be scaled up and down depending on complexity and time constraints.
- Develop a system for maintaining Slab, our team knowledge and documentation engine, beginning with the most pressing needs and opportunities for the product team.
- Audit, improve and set up new automations for our audience research database.
- Develop a system for triaging and prioritizing inbound requests alongside product-led work to enable us to make decisions more effectively and efficiently.
- Iterate on organization-wide recruiting and onboarding processes to meet the specific needs of product team roles.
- Implement a system for coordinating and scheduling cross-departmental work.
Recurring tasks may include:
- Synthesizing and reporting out from retrospectives, with an eye toward our biggest opportunities for improvement.
- Facilitating sprints and documentation days.
- Spending time with product team members and their most frequent partners to understand their work and needs on a deep level.
- Maintaining a holistic understanding of product work in order to communicate regularly about project status and upcoming work.
- Onboarding new hires into core systems and workflows.
Non-essential functions (as capacity permits):
- Participating in culture building, inclusive decision making and bringing ideas to different parts of our work to help us improve as an organization, such as by helping onboard new team members or participating in our hiring process.
- Participating in team, organizational and individual relationship building, and professional development throughout the year.
Relevant skills include:
- Project management: Experience managing projects in a newsroom environment.
- Change management: Experience bringing about organizational change and operating during and through uncertainty, ambiguity and in a fast-paced environment.
- Product thinking: Understanding of the key ingredients of product development.
- Systems thinking: Can quickly pick up new software and learn how to utilize it to solve operational challenges. Can leverage the tools at hand, rather than being dependent on a specific software solution. Experience vetting news vendors is a plus.
- Facilitation: Experience facilitating group brainstorms and discussions to drive alignment. Ability to keep discussions moving forward and toward actionable insights.
- Leadership: Experience leading through influence, without direct reporting lines.
- Prioritization: Ability to prioritize work autonomously, yet proactively reach out for help when needed or when there are significant trade offs to consider.
- Communication: Ability to communicate complex ideas, goals and problems in a way that is accessible and actionable for people with different skill sets.
We know there are great candidates who might not check all these boxes or who possess important skills we haven’t thought of. If that’s you, don’t hesitate to apply and tell us about yourself. We also encourage members of traditionally underrepresented communities to apply, including people of color, LGBTQ+ people and people with disabilities.
Benefits
- Vacation time off (20 days per year)
- Sick time off (10 days per year)
- Personal time off (6 days per year)
- Holidays (17 days in 2022)
- Paid family leave (100% up to 6 months)
- Caregiver leave (100% up to 4 months)
- 401(k) Plan (up to 3.5% matching on 6% contribution)
- Flexible Spending Plan (for qualifying medical or child care expenses)
- Health, vision, and dental insurance (100% for employee / 60% for dependents)
- Professional development stipends
- Wellness and work from home reimbursement benefits
- Long term and short term disability insurance
- Life insurance
How to apply
Interested candidates should apply by April 28, 2023. Have questions about this position? Email us at [email protected]. (Note: We are not accepting résumés or applications via email; apply here.)