Head of Product Management

Location: Remote, UK based or US East Coast, as travel to our hub will be required from time to time.

Team: Product Management

As Ably enters its next stage of growth, we’re looking for talented and curious engineers to help us build and deliver the platform to power synchronized digital experiences in realtime for one billion devices every month by 2023.

Our everyday digital experiences are in the midst of a realtime revolution. Consumers expect realtime digital experiences as standard and synchronized data in realtime is business critical for many organisations. Yet, at the same time, organizations don’t have the in-house capabilities nor the time to do this efficiently at scale. That’s where Ably comes in.

We provide a suite of APIs to build, extend, and deliver powerful digital experiences in realtime for more than 250 million devices across 80 countries each month. Organizations like Toyota, Bloomberg, HubSpot, and Hopin depend on Ably’s platform to offload the growing complexity of business-critical realtime data synchronization at global scale. But we can’t rest yet. And we’d like your help.

To see what life’s like at Ably, check out our careers page at ably.com/careers and read the story of how Ably's core values came to be.

Ably's product organization makes sure we're building products that customers love. We start by understanding their organization’s ambitious vision for digital engagements with real-time elements. Then, we deliver capabilities that empower their development teams (software architects, engineers, etc.) to realize that vision faster, more easily, and in a way that scales to match their success. This involves deeply technical challenges, but we strive to make it simple for our customers by building on a wealth of experience and broad technology skills across infrastructure, DevOps, security, distributed systems, and much more. If you like finding elegant solutions to hard problems, if you like discovering untapped market opportunities, if you enjoy creating aha moments that make developers heroes, then you'll love being part of the Ably product team.

As the Head of Product Management at Ably, you’ll be responsible for the growth and development of a talented team of product managers, and will also roll up your sleeves to contribute personally to finding and delivering innovative solutions to our customer’s problems. You will report to the Chief Product Officer, and will have significant direct influence in defining how we execute as a high-performing product team.

Day to day, you will:

• Be the architect of the product management group, designing the ideal team composition and defining where we need to grow; as individuals and as a team.

• Help hire new product managers with the right skills and culture fit, and help onboard them so they can contribute meaningfully as quickly as possible.

• Coach the team to ensure that each individual is working to their full potential and that working together makes everyone even more successful.

• Identify and help unblock impediments to team members’ success.

• Drive adoption and expansion of product management best practices within the team, including both processes and tools

• Identify the right KPIs that indicate a healthy product organization, lead efforts to implement and scale the systems to measure them, and report the results to the company as a whole.

• Help drive product strategy, particularly helping to keep individual Pods aligned in efforts that support the overall company objectives.

• Be an advocate for the Product Management team across all departments at Ably

• Be an expert in our market by listening to our customers and prospects, keeping an eye on our competitors, connecting to the analyst community, and staying abreast of general trends in developer tools, technologies, and practices.

• Support Go to Market activities as a product expert through activities such as customer briefings, sales enablement training, and marketing content creation

• Extensive product management experience

• Proven and recurring people management experience

• Experience building a IaaS / SaaS / Cloud API product

• A background delivering solutions for developers or other customers in the software development ecosystem (e.g. DevOps, APM, Cloud Infrastructure, etc.)

• Knowledge of modern software development lifecycle process and methodologies

• Experience working with cross-functional teams (particularly with Agile Pod structure)

• Experience at early to mid-stage venture-backed startups

• Personal experience with software development, and are able to write code (in any modern language) to build prototypes that use our APIs.

Ably is entering a new phase of growth led by an experienced senior team. You’ll be part of a successful, highly motivated, and extremely collaborative team.

To provide the infrastructure required for the next generation of the internet, to tell the world about it, and to support everyone inside Ably to do so we hire people who are ready and capable of taking on challenging problems in a high-growth environment.

We want to work in a company of inclusive people who treat each other well. To really thrive at Ably, you’ll need to believe in and be prepared to do your work in line with our values, which are:

• Open for all. Open is a mindset. When open, we’re better collaborators, communicators and creators. Whether open source, standards, or protocols, open hearts, minds, and eyes. It’s better when it’s open.

• Bias for action. We avoid analysis paralysis at all costs. We lean into doing in order to move us forward. When we have enough of what we need to act, we act.

• Even the best do better. We want to be the best - but that doesn’t mean we rest when we are. Improvement and growth - true betterment - is an ongoing journey. One fuelled by curiosity and taking risks.

• Technology needs humanity. Our technology means little without people - whether that’s how we treat our colleagues, or how we design developer experiences. Being human matters.

• Dependable by default. Dependability is integral to our mission and technology, but being dependable starts with our people. When we care enough to take real ownership of our products and problems - all else will follow.

• Bold creativity wins. When viewed through a different lens, what stands in the way can become the way. The bigger the challenge the easier the choice: bold creativity will always move us forward, create better outcomes, and set us apart.

• A great company culture

• Share options

• The chance to learn and grow with a fast-moving company, supported by a learning budget that gives you access to professional training, events, conferences, workshops etc.

• Remote first: Unless you want to pop into our communal office space in Shoreditch, London, you’ll work from home most of the time, apart from when we have planning sessions and Summits. Travel to the office is at the employee's expense, apart from when we have Ably Summits

• Your choice of high quality tech kit to work on

• Home workstation set up budget of £500, plus an annual top-up of £150

• Regular company away days and social events

• Friday need-to-know drinks and snacks

• Private health insurance, including Doctor@Hand

• Access to private and confidential coaching with Sanctus

• 24/7 Employee Assistance Programme with AXA

• A monthly wellbeing budget with Juno

• 25 days of paid annual leave (33 days including bank holidays)

• 10 days of paid sick leave (including mental health days) per year

• Dog friendly office for when you’re in the office!

If you enjoy working as part of a technology company, value open source, and love solving hard problems - then we’d love to hear from you, regardless of whether you fit the job description exactly or not. If in doubt, drop us an email; we’d be more than happy to give you some advice on your application.

We believe our differences as individuals is what makes us great. Our people are at the heart of what we do, and we encourage everyone to be their most authentic self at Ably: we see inclusivity and openness as fundamental to creating long-term success as an organization. We encourage applications from all backgrounds regardless of age, disability, gender, sexual orientation, parental status, race, religion, educational background or neurodiversity. Ably has an amazing opportunity ahead of us, and we want anyone to be able to contribute to that opportunity.