Product Manager

We're expanding our Design and Product Management Team to include a versatile Product Manager who excels at product growth but is also strong in core/feature work and excited to collaborate on product-market fit expansion concepts. Sports Reference currently serves 20 million (and growing) monthly users through our free, ad-supported Reference sites (Baseball Reference, Basketball Reference, etc.) and Stathead (our SaaS offering that empowers users to dive deeper into our massive Reference databases with powerful search and filtering tools). We also recently acquired Immaculate Grid, the viral baseball trivia game, and have since launched ad-supported grid games for basketball, football, hockey, and soccer.

Our sites display performance metrics for thousands of athletes but your focus will be on the performance metrics of our products, such as conversion funnels, event data, and churn rate. You'll be focused on how our users are finding, using, and succeeding with our products. With that increased understanding, we will devise new strategies to find even more people who will love our products.

Sports Reference's capacity to make well-informed product decisions is growing. The current, five-person Product Group includes a wide range of disciplines, such as web development, research methods, design, user experience research, and SEO. We're seeking a Product Manager who can work with all of these disciplines (as well as our Marketing, Data, and Engineering Teams) to help define and execute our product strategy and roadmap.

You will report to the Director of Design and Product Management. We have many of the ingredients of a high-performing product team in place. Our core purpose and North Star metrics (including their inputs) are well-known across the company. We have a mountain of product ideas recorded as Bet Sheets. Our products are performing well, but we know there is an opportunity to amplify that success.

Your success in this position will be a combination of driving growth (with a focus on Stathead's growth), enhancing existing products and features to facilitate that growth, using data effectively, ensuring user satisfaction, and collaborating on new ways to expand product-market fit. It's a multifaceted role that demands a blend of strategic thinking, data analysis, collaboration, and user-centric focus.

Please visit our jobs website at https://sports-reference-llc.breezy.hr/ and submit your resume and a cover letter for this position. In your cover letter, describe your experience and why you think you would be a great fit for this role. We believe that knowledge of the sports industry (as a fan or follower, not necessarily on a professional level) would put a candidate at a significant advantage, but we would consider an exceptional candidate who does not follow sports closely.

We will begin the phone interview process the week of February 5, 2024. Applications arriving after this date, will be collected, but will receive consideration at the discretion of the hiring manager based on the progress we have made in filling the position. We have provided a general outline of our interview process here: https://www.sports-reference.com/job-interview-process.html

We democratize data, so our users enjoy, understand, and share the sports they love.

We value:

• Respect for our users, the athletes we cover, and our team;
• Craftsmanship in building tools and products;
• Reliable tools and services that meet our users' needs every day; and
• Data democratization. We publish many data sets for emerging and underserved sports. For instance, the New York Times covered our recognition of the Negro Leagues as major leagues in the summer of 2021.

To meet these expectations, we encourage team members to participate in company discussions and share new ideas, features or potential solutions to problems.

• Develop a deep understanding of our products and the users who rely on them.
• Manage and optimize the Stathead conversion funnel. Ensure campaigns are properly tracked so we can better understand the upgrade path from our free Reference sites to Stathead. By working closely with Marketing and Engineering, you'll optimize these campaigns and develop new ones.
• Also lead additional core/feature product work, including creating project detail sheets, documenting feature specifications, and testing throughout the development process.
• Work with the Director of Design and Product Management to define and execute the product strategy and roadmap through feature and growth work as well as product-market fit expansion. We will be guided by our purpose and north star metrics while favoring outcomes over outputs.
• Prepare for, lead, and synthesize user interviews related to the efforts you are leading. Additionally, regularly attend interviews related to product discovery that are led by other researchers and PMs.
• Be an active member of our Product Group. Regularly participate in Bet Sheet meetings (where we review new product ideas), prioritization exercises, and any other team rituals.
• Develop strong working relationships with all other teams at Sports Reference (Engineering, Marketing, and Data).

• Be comfortable making small changes in our codebase (such as adding UTM campaigns, tracking events, and text edits).
• Identify ways to apply more experimentation in our work so we can quickly learn and adjust.
• We describe the guiding philosophy of the visual design and usability of our sites as “aggressively functional.” We are in the initial planning stages of our first design refresh in over six years. You will most likely play a supporting role in this effort, but it will impact the products you are working on. Our end goal will be a modernized look and feel across the Reference sites and Stathead, but one that remains classic and focuses heavily on data presentation, page speed, accessibility, and readability.

• Familiarity with product analytics (Google Analytics or similar), such as event and conversion tracking. We are expecting some experience here but not necessarily extensive experience. There is room to grow here, rather than bringing in someone already at an expert level.
• Experience working on a software-as-a-service, e-commerce, or subscription product would be considered a plus.
• For example, a UX Designer/Researcher, project manager, or scrum master looking to move into product management could be a good fit if that person worked for a company selling a product or service to end users and understands how product analytics can positively influence their work.
• Continue your ongoing professional development, which we will support.

Salary range starting at $93k for U.S. based employees. We are a remote-first company and determine our pay range for this position based on the market rates for Philadelphia, our home base. The salary offered will be based on your experience and skill level. 

For candidates outside of the United States, we will calculate a local market rate based on pay for comparable positions in that market and comparable benefits packages when possible.

Annual bonuses are variable and are tied to a percentage of the company's end of year profits and the employee's time worked and salary earned during the year. In the last three years, they have averaged 15% of annual salary.