Head of Product

The Head of Product Management will:

• Ensure that Trellis’ investment into its software ultimately delivers maximum adoption, impact, and value by and for its users and stakeholders.
• Manage resourceful and methodical identification of stakeholder needs and preferences, such as through data analysis and user research, and will document and propagate this understanding, in part by becoming and/or acquiring/managing subject matter experts and expertise.
• Coordinate collaborative cross-functional processes for generating and prioritizing the right projects, scopes of work, and product requirements.
• Steer commercialization and rollout of new product functionality, such as by collaborating with marketing on promotional collateral, training business development leaders, and directly overseeing early users and beta testers.

Stakeholder needs resourcefully and methodically identified

• 30 Days: Backlog of “growth hack” ideas built from funnel analysis in Amplitude; actionable backlog items created out of interviews with affiliate partners and partnership managers
• 90 Days: Process implemented for soliciting feedback from “drop-off” users and for regular review of FullStory and support conversations; multiple cross-functional concept/scoping meetings efficiently and effectively coordinated and executed; basic auction logic improvements suggested based on revenue segmentation in Looker; clear, actionable requirements built for projects like “Money-good postbacks” and “Use new Insuramatch API”
• 365 Days: Overseeing product architecture of an entire affiliate management system, including automation and self-service of many partner success functions, such as onboarding, testing, and bid optimization

Product roadmap always filled with high-value projects, optimally prioritized

• 30 Days: Process established for prioritizing roadmap projects, product tickets, and quality and tech debt items
• 90 Days: Leading quarterly roadmap planning around company OKRs; accurately estimating hypothetical project effort on the order of weeks
• 365 Days: Daniel’s initial prioritization decisions highly accurately predicted, and Daniel’s mind changed about initial decisions at least 2-3 times

Projects undergo planning and execution with clear goals and requirements

• 30 Days: “Reset password” re-launch planning and spec’d; backlog groomed weekly for each eng team
• 90 Days: Savvy Search v4 experience imagined, researched, and spec’d; design and engineering rarely blocked product input
• 365 Days: New software development lifecycle processes introduced to meet growing concern for product quality and “lots of new engineers” challenge

Projects receive strong adoption and deliver anticipated value

• 30 Days: Sales collateral built, explaining upcoming homeowners and renters functionality
• 90 Days: Partnerships leaders confidently promote new functionality nearly as soon as it’s ready, thanks to new processes created and executed by Product
• 365 Days: Custom features designed for and used by a Top-4 insurance company with myriad departments who have competing concerns and interests

Trellis team members feel excited and motivated with respect to product direction

• 30 Days: Process established for submitting product feedback or ideas
• 90 Days: Launch party organized, with appreciation lavished on significant contributors
• 365 Days: High fidelity “vision” (e.g. deck or video) that at least one candidate mentions was a motivator to join

Trellis product team scaling to meet growing needs

• 30 Days: Initial job reqs/plans drafted and recruiters onboarded and calibrated
• 90 Days: Individual contributor product manager or product analyst hired
• 365 Days: Team of 3-4 contributors built and performing at a high level

1. Amazing communicator – Can read between the lines in what people say and write, and can simplify, express, and motivate around complicated subjects through the use of appropriate synthesis/brevity, precise semantics, structured and logical reasoning, and narrative.
2. Quantitative thinker – Has a great gut feel for working with normal and non-normal distributions, can define KPI’s that capture complex business challenges, and estimate and predict outcomes from changes to complex, multidimensional systems.
3. Likable and influential – This person will need to do a lot of indirect management and influencing. If they become disliked, then they’re dead in the water.
4. Creative – This person will need to lead the “out of the box” thinking to address as many needs as possible with the least amount of effort.
5. Motivated team player – This job is nebulous and hard to measure. Given the “call of duty” is fuzzy, it’s easy to shrink the scope narrowly. So we need someone who’s going to go above and beyond their explicit charter.