Product Manager

Hello 👋

I'm Christina-CEO here at Unity.

We're a high-growth, bootstrapped HR-tech start-up building and selling software that helps in-house talent acquisition teams attract, hire and retain the best talent.

We launched in 2018, and have since grown to hundreds of customers, millions in revenue, consistent triple-digit year-on-year growth, a team of ~20 incredible people, and a robust and beautiful product used by growing organisations every day, all without taking on a penny of outside capital.

The journey so far has been awesome - and we're just getting started - but these first signs of meaningful scale have meant our team are spread thin, our customer base (and their expectations of our product) has broadened, and it's harder to manage the competing priorities of our various stakeholders (customers, internal teams, etc.).

It's time for our first product manager.

We need someone to own product end-to-end, and (more importantly), we need someone with a set of skills and experience that I (CEO and de-facto product manager to date) don't have! The role will report directly into me, but you'll work closely with every leader in the business (Customer Success, Engineering, Sales, Marketing, etc.) and in time will be responsible for building out a fully-fledged product team.

If this sounds like the kind of role that'd be appealing to you, read on - but before we dive into the detail, here are a few things about Unity that'll either make you say "hell, yeah", or "hell, no":

• We don't mind where you're based, but you'll need to ensure you have at least four hours of timezone overlap with UK to ensure we can work together as productively as possible. You'll need a quiet location to work from with good internet connectivity if you're working remote (we are happy to pay for access to a co-working space if needed).
• We're growing fast and this role is key to our growth. You'll be well compensated (as well as a meaningful equity allocation, great benefits and so on), but expectations are high and we all work hard here - we're not the company you join if you're looking to 'slow down'.
• We don't work with one particular industry or size of organization, and we sell to all European and US time zones. You'll be expected to quickly understand the challenges faced by all of these different types of organisations, position our product to maximise the value we're adding to these organisations and so on. It's not easy.
• We're bootstrapped, profitable, and have no plans to raise external capital at this stage. We have a clearly defined strategy from today through to exit (we'll share this in detail with you through the hiring process) and we believe there are a number of huge benefits to our approach, but being bootstrapped also introduces challenges - our team is smaller than an average VC-backed business at our stage, we each carry more responsibility than would be typical, and we are much more intentional about how we deploy our capital.
• Our HQ is in Jersey, UK but we built the company to be remote-first and have a distributed remote team across the UK and US.

What you'll be doing

You'll help us drive the product vision and development of our core user experience across our three main personas - in-house recruiters, hiring managers and their candidates.

To do this, you'll own the complete product lifecycle - defining product requirements, working with the team on low-fi wireframes, drafting and reviewing specs and partnering with engineering, design, marketing, sales and customer success to deliver meaningful product improvements for our customers and prospects against a planned schedule.

The specifics of how you allocate your time, what initiatives / projects you prioritise from a product perspective and so on are all up for grabs. The team and I all know that we need to level-up the way we think about product, and this role is going to help us do that. We're looking for someone who can very quickly ramp up (i.e. in weeks, not months), develop an understanding of our market, product, team, processes and so on - once you've done so, basically everything about how we deliver product is up for grabs.

That said, if you're looking for examples of how we're spending our time from a product perspective at the moment, here are a few:

• Understanding our customers, their pain points, and how they're using our product - having direct conversations with customers, reviewing support requests, evaluating survey responses and digging into analytics.
• Reviewing our 'product stack' and implementing systems and tools to help streamline and scale product internally - e.g. Linear for issue tracking, Segment for customer data / logging, Abstract for design review and so on.
• Defining both a short and long-term roadmap and communicating that effectively both internally and externally.
• Implementing better product education (again, both internally and externally) - working with sales and customer success to ensure they're aware of new releases and the ramifications of those releases on our customers and prospects, and working with customer success specifically to ensure we're delivering a fantastic in-product support experience.
• Working on our ecosystem - we are strong believers in an open ecosystem - we want to 'stay in our lane' and focus on the ATS market, but have an Open API and a large (and rapidly growing) ecosystem of third-party integration partners that offer best-in-class point solutions across the wider HR Tech landscape. There's work to be done to improve our partner programme, better roadmap integrations, continually improve and better document our Open API, etc.

What you'll need to do well in this role

Our ideal candidate will have:

• 3+ years' work experience in a product lead / product management role at a growth stage SaaS business, ideally in the B2B space.
• Much better than average written and verbal communication skills.
• Exceptional listening skills and the ability to assess information quickly.
• Strong technical acumen, plus solid data and analytical skills. We want someone who has a real instinct and can think strategically, but who can validate / back up their strategy with data.
• Strong user experience and design sensibilities. We care a lot about design, and we'll need you to do so as well.
• The ability to tell compelling stories that offer valuable perspectives / the ability to evangelise our product both internally and externally.
• The ability to communicate effectively with stakeholders of all roles and levels within the business - you'll need to ensure engineering, sales, marketing and customer success are all working in alignment, and build authority and mutual respect with individuals within all of these teams to deliver in the role.
• The ability to learn fast and get up to speed with our systems and processes quickly, as well as to help us define and implement new systems and processes as needed.
• A desire and ability to perform exceptionally well in an ambiguous and fast-paced start-up environment.

Please note that the experience, skills and so on listed above are not explicit requirements. They're there to give you a feel for the type of person we're looking for - if you have some but not all of these, but don't be put off from applying - but be prepared to explain how your perspective / experience / skills / etc set you apart from our applicants when we speak.

We expect a lot from you, but in return you'll

• Be part of a business where Product is massively respected across the board - whilst we don't yet have a dedicated product team, we made considerable early investments in our brand, build out a design system to prepare us for product scale, have a robust customer success team that engages proactively with our customers to understand their product requirements and so on. We all understand the importance of getting this hire right.
• Make a meaningful, measurable contribution to the business and define both the direction of the product itself, as well as the design, structure and execution of our entire product organisation as we scale over the coming years.
• Get the support you need to do a great job (MacBook Pro, the software you need, personal development budget, regular 1:1s, etc).
• Work extremely closely with high-calibre, experienced and bloody lovely team members from our founders down to our newest team members.
• Visit our office in Jersey regularly (if you're working remote).
• Have unlimited holidays (minimum requirement of 21 days per year).
• Be able to work where and when you want (as long as you're getting the job done).
• Get top of the line healthcare for you and your family.
• Get a meaningful equity allocation.
• Grow your career, fast.

We understand that this will be one of many jobs you hold over the course of your career, and we work extremely hard to get to know you personally, to understand as much as possible about your longer-term plans / career trajectory, and to shape your experience here at Unity in support of that. If the time comes that you want to move onto a new role in the future, you'll have loads of experience and a compelling story of how you made a huge impact, in a high-growth business, in a competitive market.

About Unity

We're changing the way companies hire, and rewriting the rules of recruitment.

With our simple, intelligent software and unlimited help from our team our customers attract more 'good fit' candidates, select from the best, and wow their new hire from the moment they say 'yes'.

If you're looking for somewhere you can learn quickly, make a meaningful impact in a fast-paced business, and grow your career, you're in the right place.

We'll enable you to do your best work with the tools you need, support from the rest of the team, and an expectation that you'll challenge that status quo—helping us continually improve what we do.