Director of Product

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in Netherlands.

📋 Description

• Engage in ongoing customer interactions, including discovery calls, renewals, and support signals.

• Translate enterprise needs into precise specifications that engineering can utilize, outlining the fundamental issues.

• Maintain a prioritized roadmap that highlights what is being delivered, what has changed, and the reasons behind these alterations.

• Link significant roadmap items to anticipated business outcomes.

• Evaluate enterprise requests for urgency and determine if they indicate a larger trend.

• Manage expectations among sales, leadership, and customers when priorities shift.

• Establish success metrics for major features and conduct follow-ups post-launch.

• Collaborate with technical leads on sequencing, feasibility assessments, dependencies, and release schedules.

• Clearly communicate the implications of directional changes before they impact a team.

• Provide engineering teams with customer insights to foster enhanced solutions and facilitate pushback.

• Balance customer-focused initiatives with reliability and platform-related tasks.

• Set the operational rhythm and standards for product planning and execution.

• Recruit and cultivate PMs while staying actively involved in assigned product areas.

• Collaborate with go-to-market and marketing teams on positioning for new features.

• Drive product strategy and decision-making for the Weaviate Database, Weaviate Cloud, and agent products.

• Oversee a small product team, likely consisting of one to three PMs over time.

• Work directly with the CTO on vision and engage with technical leads regarding feasibility.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 8 years of experience in product management, including recent hands-on individual contributor roles.

• Have directly managed a roadmap, not just through a team.

• Experience working with enterprise clients, covering discovery, gathering requirements, and managing expectations for large accounts.

• Proven track record of quantifying the business impact of roadmap decisions and advocating for prioritization to skeptical stakeholders.

• Comfortable in technically complex domains such as databases, data infrastructure, distributed systems, or developer tools.

• Ability to engage effectively with technical leads; an engineering background is not mandatory.

• Experience in managing product processes using Linear or a similar tool, with a well-defined opinion on setup.

• Excellent written communication skills; decision-making primarily occurs through documentation.

• Some experience in people management or clear readiness to lead a team of one to three individuals.

• Availability during working hours between GMT and ET, with some flexibility for early or late calls.

• Background check required as part of the onboarding process.

🏝️ Benefits

• 100% remote work with flexible hours.

• Paid time off.

• Budget allocated for conferences, co-working spaces, home office equipment, etc.

• Collaborate with experienced and enjoyable team members.

• Opportunities for learning and personal development.

• Freedom, flexibility, and a sense of responsibility.

• Work at the cutting edge of search, ML/AI, and cloud-native technologies, all within an open-source framework.