Product Manager

You are an empathic and visionary product person who loves Gitpod’s direction and wants to be part of the journey. At its core Gitpod provisions, secures and orchestrates containers and we deploy the latest open-source container technology. We are looking for someone experienced with product discovery who is an engineer at heart. You’ll help us shape the latest container technology working at the intersection of Linux and cloud native technologies.

As a product manager at Gitpod you will team up with the Engineer Manager to form ?The Product Engineering Leadership Team. Together, you’ll have a shared accountability in driving the business forward as you guide and empower the team to decide what we need to ship to solve the biggest user issues. A product manager at Gitpod adds the product execution and discipline required to increase our development velocity to solve the most impactful user problems. 

You empower the “Workspace” product engineering team to function like a Swiss clockwork - reliably and predictably delivering user value at a sustainable pace. The workspace team is responsible for the ongoing security, stability, and performance of Gitpod workspaces. This encompasses the Kubernetes clusters hosting workspaces in the Gitpod SaaS, as well as related software components, which also ship with our self-hosted product. 

You work on product discovery and product design (not visually) making sure we are always focussed on the most important customer problems at the right time. You will be collaborating with the team to design solutions via design docs which are based on input from users and team members as well as data and “good taste”™. You’ll be supporting the product engineering team in understanding why product features and ecosystem trends are valuable, as well as help elucidate when they are unclear. You will always be on the lookout for new possibilities and sweet spots that will make our product more useful, reliable and faster for our target audience. You are conscious about the limited engineering time and therefore know what to do and what not to do. You are a nice person who wants to work with an open and collaborative remote team of highly motivated engineers.

As part of the team you will ...

?‍♀️ Co-own the product and work self-directed

You’ll identify and prioritize the most important customer problems to make sure the team is working on the right things at the right time. You’re co-owning and shaping our product roadmaps together with the product managers from other teams.

?‍♂️ Work with the entire team and our community

You’re constantly listening to the input of users and team members to ensure the team is focused on the most important issues with the highest leverage. You’ll drive the structure and processes needed to enable this focus and clarity.

? Ship it

You guide the team to make incremental progress towards the product vision in manageable, executable bits, following a minimum-viable-change philosophy. You’re responsible for progress towards our vision, product roadmap and quarterly goals & results.

?Evaluate and document the requirements for new product features

You are responsible for analyzing, documenting and articulating the requirements for new product features, answer questions and make scope trade off decisions as needed.

?Author technical design docs and PoCs

Discovering potential product features means investing into prototypes mostly in using sketches and docs but sometimes small technical spikes are needed as well.

?Help building out our product department

We have flat hierarchies with product managers in every product engineering team. You will collaborate closely with our CEO and other product managers to further build out our product department and discipline.

What we need

✨You are a fantastic product manager

We are looking for someone who has experience in product development through the complete product discovery to delivery life cycle and is knowledgeable about the techniques this role requires.

☸️ You know a thing or two about container runtime/orchestration

We are building a product for professional software engineers. While empathy is important, you must have some experience in Container runtime or orchestration. Reading about our workspace ? Architecture should excite you.

?You are a startup person

You have worked in an entrepreneurial environment and helped scale teams. You feel comfortable working in a fast-paced environment and you are willing to take risks.

?You share our values

We are developer-led and aim for a frictionless experience when interacting with our product, our company and our brand: no hurdles, no BS, no unnecessary extra steps. We are open minded, inclusive, transparent and curious. We always remain students of the game, not masters of the game. We have opinions, but are not opinionated. We integrate, don't dictate.

?You care for our mission

Developers architect our future. Gitpod democratises software development by making it more accessible to all developers. Ready-to-code, cloud-based development environments streamline how software is written today.

?You are a good communicator

We work remote, our users are remote too. You value writing and express yourself concisely. You may hold strong opinions, but you are not ideological. You communicate thoughtfully, always assume others speak in good faith, aim to understand opposing perspectives and compromise when needed.

Our Stack

Gitpod is a distributed application running on Kubernetes. Services are written in Go and TypeScript (Node.JS), while all things frontend are React and TypeScript. We communicate using gRPC, RabbitMQ and JSON-RPC. We develop Gitpod in Gitpod, build using leeway and werft and automatically deploy preview environments for every branch.

Browser-based productivity tools for the rest

Gitpod for development, GitHub for issue tracking and as git hoster, Slack for comms, Figma for design, Notion as our virtual HQ, Pitch for slides, Loom for screencasts and a few others.

We care about you

• 6 weeks paid time off
• Fully remote & flexible working hours
• Competitive salary & equity package
• Regular offsites with the whole company
• Mental health stipend
• Educational budget
• Physical health stipend
• Premium work-from-home equipment

The Process

We are fully remote - so is our hiring process. We value written and async communication, you will get a taste of it during the process.

• Step 1 - Submit your application by filling out the form on the right side. The more information you give us the better. We will review your submission and may reach out with a quick questionnaire.
• Step 2 - Screening questionnaire (async). We prepared a couple of questions that you can either answer in text or by recording a Loom video.
• Step 3 - Technical challenge & interview. We are open-source so we are interested in how you would tackle solving some of our real world challenges. We take them directly from our backlog. We are conscious of your time and will, of course, reimburse you for your efforts.
• Step 4 - Gitpod Fit. All Gitpodders share a set of values. Get to know our founders and see if there is fit and a common ground for a successful working relationship.
• Step 5 - References. Before receiving the offer we would like to better understand how former colleagues have worked together with you.
• Step 6 - Join Gitpod and help removing friction from the developer experience ?