Product Owner – Innovation Team

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in Poland, +5 more countries.

📋 Description

• Lead a compact, senior, fully remote innovation team that transforms new product concepts from ideas into functional MVPs delivered to customers.

• Manage the pipeline of product ideas, ensuring rigorous testing speed and providing evidence for go/no-go decisions.

• Engage in customer discussions, define project scopes, prioritize tasks, mentor the team, and report directly to the CPO.

• Create prototypes, conduct spikes, and set up demo stands; actively participate in design and code evaluations.

• Capture, assess, prioritize, and document assumptions related to product concepts.

• Develop funded concepts into working MVPs, usually within a quarter, with a designated customer or design partner for testing.

• Establish success criteria and track metrics such as usage, conversion rates, willingness to pay, and support requirements.

• Make informed go/no-go decisions; transition validated products to product lines along with runbooks and roadmaps.

• Document insights gained from concepts that do not succeed.

• Provide weekly status and risk updates to the CPO, including item owners and due dates for all tasks.

• Choose the most efficient credible build approach whether through buying, borrowing, open-source, or custom development.

• Create prototypes and demo stands; review all designs and code produced by the team.

• Ensure MVPs are production-ready, including packaging, secure rollout strategies, rollback plans, and observability measures.

• Collaborate with architecture and product teams to facilitate adoption without necessitating a rewrite.

• Conduct one-on-one meetings, goal-setting sessions, performance evaluations, and support career development for distributed team members.

• Recruit, interview, onboard, and mentor engineers.

• Establish asynchronous working agreements, maintain written decisions, encourage public communication, and prefer demos over status meetings.

• Model and coach effective use of AI coding agents, covering tasks such as prompting, code review, context provision, iteration, error recovery, and task completion.

• Utilize AI agents to develop prototypes, create testing datasets, and draft materials for customer engagement.

• Achieve first-90-day objectives, including team assessment, customer interaction, pipeline ownership, prototype delivery, and a prioritized portfolio of initiatives.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 5 years of experience as a software engineer.

• At least 2 years of experience leading a small team, such as in roles like team lead, tech lead with personnel responsibilities, founder, or engineering manager.

• Proven history of guiding at least one product from concept to first paying customers while successfully halting one that was not viable.

• Strong proficiency in Linux at a software engineer level.

• Comfortable with building and reviewing code in languages such as Python, Go, or TypeScript.

• Ability to debug live systems directly.

• Practical skills in product discovery, including conducting customer interviews, mapping assumptions, conducting pricing experiments, and analyzing usage and conversion data.

• Experience in quickly mastering complex technical domains and making credible architectural decisions.

• Demonstrated leadership abilities, including conducting one-on-ones, performance discussions, hiring, and developing engineers.

• Familiarity with an agentic/AI-assisted development workflow.

• Professional proficiency in both written and spoken English.

• Must be available to work during EU hours.

• Nice to have: experience in the web hosting environment, including cPanel/WHM, Plesk, DirectAdmin, or infrastructure for a hosting provider.

• Nice to have: background in security products, such as runtime protection, web application firewalls, malware detection, vulnerability management, or patching.

• Nice to have: experience with freemium or product-led growth strategies and self-service billing.

• Nice to have: familiarity with Node.js or Python runtimes and their respective package ecosystems.

• Nice to have: comfort in presenting to customers and at industry conferences.

🏝️ Benefits

• Emphasis on professional development.

• Engaging and challenging projects.

• Fully remote work with flexible hours, allowing you to manage your schedule and work from anywhere globally.

• Paid 24 days of vacation annually.

• 10 days of national holidays.

• Unlimited sick leave.

• Coverage for private health insurance.

• Reimbursement for co-working spaces.

• Gym/sports reimbursement.

• Budget allocated for education.

• Opportunity to earn a reward for the most innovative idea that the company can patent.