As the first full-time Product Manager (PM) at Stellate, you will play a pivotal role in driving the growth of our products. We’re looking for a highly motivated and experienced PM to oversee the entire product lifecycle in strategy and execution. Our product philosophy and processes are shaped by Teresa Torres and her “Continuous Discovery” methods.

The mission of Stellate’s product department is to enable and empower everyone to build successful products that execute against Stellate’s mission of bringing superpowers to large-scale GraphQL APIs.

About Us And The Hard Problems We Are Solving

At Stellate, we’re working towards a vision of unlocking the world’s data. We are on a mission to bring superpowers to large-scale GraphQL APIs. We believe GraphQL is the best way to access data at large-scale companies.

GraphQL turns APIs from a list of endpoints into graphs. This shift in the representation of the data from a mere list of endpoints to a graph leads to the main benefit of GraphQL: flexibility in access to your data. This flexibility also explains the main tradeoff of GraphQL in the form of unique challenges to building and operating APIs at large-scale, including performance, security, maintenance and scalability.

GraphQL is based on a strict specification that every GraphQL API follows. This allows us to build tools that help with these challenges once and then sell them to everybody using GraphQL that needs them! That’s why our mission is to bring superpowers to large-scale GraphQL APIs: build the superpower once; power up everybody that needs it!

Our current main product is GraphQL Edge Caching, which allows companies in certain industries to significantly speed up their response times, improve their scalability (particularly during traffic spikes), and save costs.

Role Responsibilities

The main responsibility of our PM is to shape the product vision, translate it into a cohesive roadmap, and work closely with cross-functional teams to ensure successful delivery and, thus, successful outcomes.

As of today, we are focused on increasing the value our customers get and speeding up how quickly they see the value from our GraphQL edge caching product. At some later point, the scope will expand to setting a roadmap for creating more products that bring superpowers to large-scale GraphQL APIs.

This role will report to our co-founder and CTO, Tim Suchanek. Here are some of the things you would be responsible for:

• Translate Stellate’s mission of giving large-scale GraphQL APIs superpowers into a cohesive product vision and strategy.
• Identify market opportunities, understand user needs & problems, and develop features and enhancements that improve caching capabilities and performance.
• Own the product development process, from problem discovery and prioritization to solution delivery and iteration based on learnings, and ensure the delivery of high-quality solutions that impact our north star metric, the number of cache hits our ICPs get.
• Live, breathe, and exemplify our departmental product values, which are how we believe our product department at Stellate needs to work to have the best chances of success:
  • Bring relentless curiosity
  • Discern signal from noise
  • Be organized
  • Execute without ego
  • Develop deep connections
• Become deeply connected to and familiar with the (potential or existing) buyers, champions, and users of our products at the companies that match our Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
  • Our current ICP hypothesis is e-commerce and news organizations that use GraphQL. The people at those companies that buy, champion, or use Stellate are within their engineering departments, often around DevOps and/or platform teams.
• Lead cross-functional collaboration with design, engineering, sales, and marketing teams.
  • Foster a collaborative culture, facilitate effective decision-making, and champion our user’s voices throughout the product development process.
  • Ensure everybody involved in the product development process deeply understands the Why of what they’re doing.
• Create and manage the product roadmap, balancing short-term deliverables with long-term vision.
  • Identify and prioritize opportunities based on user needs, business potential, and technological feasibility.
  • Measure product performance and make data-driven adjustments to the roadmap as needed.
• Develop pragmatic product management processes, foster a strong product culture, and mentor future product team members as the company scales and evolves.

Requirements

• Previous experience leading product management in developer tooling/infrastructure/DevOps/etc. companies with a proven track record of successfully launching and managing high-quality products from ideation to launch.
• Strong strategic problem-solving abilities to translate business objectives into product strategy and roadmap.
• Excellent execution skills with a proven ability to turn strategic plans into action and results.
• Solid understanding of software development processes and ability to converse fluently with engineering teams and discuss technical concepts and requirements.
• Adept at making data-driven decisions, utilizing analytics, user feedback, and market trends to inform product direction and improvements.
• Clear communication skills and ability to articulate complex concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Strong collaborator, experienced in establishing relationships and leading cross-functional projects.
• User-centric mindset with the ability to advocate for the user and incorporate user feedback into the product development process.
• Previous experience in early or growth stage startups, preferably building scaleable product processes.
• Comfortable working with ambiguity and driving product growth in a dynamic environment.
• WANT: Familiarity with Teresa Torres’ continuous discovery philosophy and inclination to relentlessly explore and question the status quo.
• WANT: B2B enterprise SaaS experience
• NICE TO HAVE: Previous experience with building products for e-commerce

How We Work Together

There are many ways to build an amazing company culture, and we’re on our journey to define ours. So we ask you for your investment, participation, and intentionality in co-creating the unique culture at Stellate.

• We believe in hiring the best talent around the globe. That’s why we are a 100% distributed company. The “distributed first” mindset has been baked into our company and culture from day one.
• We’re a company full of global misfits, so it’s not in our DNA to believe in looking for those who are a “culture fit”. We intentionally look for those who are a value add to our culture.
• English is a second language for 90% of our company. We call nine countries “home”. Our exec team is 33% women of color.
• We have global pay parity and compensation transparency to ensure equal pay.
• We default to asynchronous communication. By reducing the number of meetings, we can build a scalable asynchronous culture and enable us to collaborate across time zones.
• Though we are distributed, we know that nothing replaces the connection that is created in person. That’s why we hold three company-wide off-sites per year. In addition, each department is empowered and enabled with a healthy budget to hold department-level off-sites. We also have a perk for each employee to visit any other employee around the globe three times a year.
• We believe that the small things in work-life really matter and add up. Micro-moments of connection during our work days are essential.
• We use quarterly OKRs that map to annual goals to ensure we’re all focused on the most meaningful and impactful work that aligns with our business goals.

Check out our 2023 Benefits and Perks to learn more about how we support those in our company.

Our Shared Values

We believe that being aligned on our shared values is the foundation of how we build, belong, and how we show up for each other and to the broader ecosystem.

• Win as one team: We can’t win alone, we have to win together. Combining our unique experiences and skillsets allows us to achieve more together. By fostering an environment of trust, collaboration, and growth, we can maximize our collective potential and do the best work of our lives.
• Make an impact: The story of a startup has two ends: Change the world or die. To change the world, we need to build quality products that solve real problems in a way that is better, greater, and quicker than everything that came before. We can succeed in positively impacting people’s lives by growing, learning, and elevating those around us.
• Intentionality: Intentionality permeates everything we do. Our actions demonstrate our choices in the “how” and “why” of the way we show up to the broader ecosystem and each other. Our actions build the foundation of trust, vulnerability, and accountability.
• Iterate quickly: A startup is a race against running out of funds and market competition. The only way to win this race is to run fast in the right direction (velocity). We win if we discover ways to solve problems engineering organizations face at speed greater than our competition and before the funds run out. We do this by testing our assumptions and quickly iterating upon our learnings.

You can read our open letter to all future team members penned by Sue Odio, our COO.

Compensation Philosophy

As a fully distributed company, we’ve made a bold decision not to anchor pay to employees’ physical location, no matter where they are in the world. You can find out more about our “One Job, One Pay” on our company blog.

We also believe that pay transparency is a diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging initiative, as well as the best way for a company our size to hold ourselves accountable to a fair pay policy.

The compensation range for this role is between $155K (Level 3) – $220K (Level 6) annually, based on current market data.

Don’t Meet Every Single Requirement?

Studies have shown that women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification. At Stellate we are dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive and authentic workplace, so if you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyways. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.

GDPR

When you apply to a job on this site, the personal data contained in your application will be collected by Stellate (“Controller”), which is located at 650 Castro St Ste 120 #90571, Mountain View, CA 94041 and can be contacted by emailing [email protected] Controller’s data protection officer is Max Stoiber, who can be contacted at [email protected]. Your personal data will be processed for the purposes of managing Controller’s recruitment related activities, which include setting up and conducting interviews and tests for applicants, evaluating and assessing the results thereto, and as is otherwise needed in the recruitment and hiring processes. Such processing is legally permissible under Art. 6(1)(f) of Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (General Data Protection Regulation) as necessary for the purposes of the legitimate interests pursued by the Controller, which are the solicitation, evaluation, and selection of applicants for employment.

Your personal data will be shared with Greenhouse Software, Inc., a cloud services provider located in the United States of America and engaged by Controller to help manage its recruitment and hiring process on Controller’s behalf. Accordingly, if you are located outside of the United States, your personal data will be transferred to the United States once you submit it through this site. Because the European Union Commission has determined that United States data privacy laws do not ensure an adequate level of protection for personal data collected from EU data subjects, the transfer will be subject to appropriate additional safeguards under standard contractual clauses. You can obtain a copy of the standard contractual clauses by contacting us at [email protected].

Your personal data will be retained by Controller as long as Controller determines it is necessary to evaluate your application for employment. Under the GDPR, you have the right to request access to your personal data, to request that your personal data be rectified or erased, and to request that processing of your personal data be restricted. You also have to right to data portability. In addition, you may lodge a complaint with an EU supervisory authority.