Product Manager, Developer Productivity

Toast is driven by building the restaurant platform that helps restaurants adapt, take control, and get back to what they do best: building the businesses they love.

About this roll* (Responsibilities) 

Our Senior Technical Product Manager for Developer Platform will act as an advocate and champion for their customer - our developers. They complete competitive research & understanding of the broad developer landscape to understand best practices and industry norms, sharing those learnings with the team and stakeholders. They deeply understand the current development landscape within Toast and from that base they drive product vision and strategy for developer productivity offerings and align with stakeholders. They establish our developer experience principles: how our products should feel to developers and the core attributes that we want them to embody. They develop product roadmaps that inform their engineering team of what problems need to be solved and prioritise the work based on expected impact.

They create strong partnerships with Toast engineering teams by creating continuous feedback loops that allow us to better understand their problems. They ultimately define how we measure developer productivity and drive the execution and continuous evaluation of those metrics. They establish themselves as a champion and subject matter expert on developer productivity across the R&D organisation.

Problem Space

• Document and Distil current pains facing the engineering org and make it available to technical leaders so that they can design solutions that can maximise impact.
• Research current development processes and tools used within the engineering org. Synthesise the results into personas—based on technologies, line of business and any other factors identified.
• Maintain an up to date understanding of the distribution of personas across the org (e.g., count, geo, seniority) and their relative satisfaction with their individual tools.
• Attach appropriate data points and impacts to help drive prioritization
• Capture and document critical business drivers across development leadership
• Build a cohesive view of the tools being purchased or built across the entire R&D org and drive alignment across the many different teams (e.g., WEX, dev-platform, Scale, InfraEng, EC teams, NV, QA, etc) to ensure efficient allocation of money and resources across Toast.
• Assess the ecosystem of tools available outside of Toast (open source, third party), and those privately developed at top-tier tech companies, to identify opportunities for advancing the state of the art at Toast.
• Evaluate tools and potential tool ideas. Produce synthesized documentation of these tools that can drive the roadmaps of tooling teams across R&D.
• Advocate for the purchase of third party tools as appropriate and be the leader in the roll out of such tools.

Working with team

• Build trust and a strong working relationship with dev management & TDL
• Build trust and a good relationship with all team members
• Inspire a product and impact mindset to the team through daily interactions that demonstrate to the team the power of rapid learning through customer interactions and data
• Be an equal partner in the design process of solutions to problems to ensure that they can be useful to as many developers as possible, and embody best practices
• Daily presence with the team to help answer any questions or provide clarity as needed
• Participation or lead in various ceremonies of the team - grooming, planning, standups, demos, etc
• Partner with technical leaders in prioritising incoming work
• Actively monitor the use of products owned by the team to identify / prioritise areas that need attention
• Partner with engineering team to detect latent and new problems —  by way of metrics and user conversations
• Partner with engineering team to analyse and prioritise issues as they arise
• Celebrate success and bring customer/stakeholder feedback back to the team

Customers & Communications

• Build rollout and adoption plans with inputs from your dev team and stakeholders
• Anticipate and resolve blockers before they arise
• Clear & timely communication to customers of upcoming releases or impacting changes
• Ensure alignment is clear across all groups to drive successful adoption and maximise impact
• Publicising or promotion of the product/area both internally & externally, including communicating the impact/benefit of your features/releases
• Contribution or ownership of regular newsletter/communications
• Leading on contributions/content for your area for the regular business reporting - QBRs, etc

Strategy & Planning

• Ownership & strong prioritisation of the problems to be solved and desired outcomes
• Clear business case & success criteria for major features along with the data points to measure success
• Ownership or contribution to defining OKRs & constantly measuring progress against objectives
• Uses data to understand how the products are being used, by whom and identifies the areas we want to impact
• Builds a vision/mission for the team/product to help inspire & direct the team towards ultimate success
• Sees beyond the immediate planning horizon to initiate processes, conversations, alignment or dependencies that will de-risk the strategic initiatives in their own area
• Influence product leadership with your recommendations to impact future business strategy
• Increase business knowledge across the teams that you work with so they can make better product decisions

Measures of Success

• Developer overall NPS
• Key productivity metrics when established
• Leadership feedback
• Peer feedback
• Team Product NPS

Do you have the right ingredients*? (Requirements)

• A healthy blend of deep technical knowledge with customer-focused mindset and empathy
• Demonstrated passion for developer productivity and experience
• Strategic thinker that can relate technology solutions to customer use cases and think holistically about end-to-end experience
• Ability to manage a portfolio of bigger and smaller bets while balancing short-term goals and long-term vision
• Comfortable applying a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods to define success and problem solving without perfect metrics
• Good balance of IQ & EQ to be able to solve both technical and social challenges
• Insatiable curiosity to learn new domains, keep up with industry innovation, and constantly ask ‘why’
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills; timely communication with clear expectations

*Bread puns encouraged but not required

Our Spread of Total Rewards

• Unlimited Vacation
• Sabbatical opportunity after five years
• Professional Development Reimbursement Program
• Commitment to Employee Wellness through resources such as a quarterly Wellness Stipend
• Various peer and company recognition programs 
• 401(k) and matching
• Medical, Dental, & Vision Coverage
• Mental Health Benefits
• Subsidized backup childcare

*Bread puns encouraged but not required

#LI-Boston, MA