VP, Product Management

Cockroach Labs is the creator of CockroachDB, the most highly evolved cloud-native, distributed SQL database on the planet that scales fast, survives anything, and thrives anywhere. We created CockroachDB to unshackle teams from the constraints of their database. Join us on our mission to enable every developer to build world-changing applications!

We are looking for a proven VP, Product Management that can create the processes, culture, and organizational structures to turn CockroachDB into a platform that powers the mission-critical, data-intensive applications prominent among our self-hosted customers while also decidedly tilting our investments to enable us to deliver CockroachDB as a service. 

This candidate will reinforce our flywheel for taking feedback and learnings from the cloud operations team to improve the core database and the developer/operator ergonomics around it. Furthermore, PMs on their teams will prioritize investments to ensure the TCO and price/performance profile for today and tomorrow’s workloads is attractive in the context of our differentiators. 

While SaaS is our future, the majority of revenue will come from self-hosted for some time. This leader is responsible for the strategy and controls around our open source / enterprise split, refining guidelines for which capabilities should be paid, and partnering with the GTM teams to ensure we are hitting the right balance between adoption and monetization. 

This person will be responsible for all product management teams for the core database user journeys, which span the self-hosted product and the SaaS product. 

• Refine and run the “operating system” for the entire product management team, which has user journeys in both the self-hosted (open core) and SaaS form factors.
• Evaluate the success of the Product Management team in achieving its goals specifically supporting top level company OKRAs  and formulate plans to correct any issues
• Assist in maximizing the company's operating performance and achieving its financial goals.
• Build relationships with various department heads to facilitate global optimization of resources across divisions.
• Coach, and scale CockroachDB director-level product leaders, providing the context and air cover they need for their organizations to move the product team forward.
• Balance portfolio of platform investments to support needs of large self-hosted customers while enabling SaaS customers, which tend to be less sophisticated. 
• Partner with the CPO to communicate progress at the executive level from both a product-market fit and budget perspective.
• Stay aware of competitors, the market, expansion opportunities and new industry standards and development.

In the first 30 days, you will understand the market context, our strategic priorities, and in flight major initiatives. You’ll get a sense for our core processes for building products for both self-hosted and SaaS users, and some of the tradeoffs and leverage points we have available to us. You’ll meet with your direct reports and their teams, as well as the department heads in supporting functions like Engineering, Sales, Customer Success, and Marketing. You will start to lead the core PM rituals around OKRs and departmental events and take other VP, PM responsibilities over from the CPO.

After three months you will be fully integrated into the team, and have a hypothesis on what investments we need to make, and what capabilities we need to build, to continue on our mission of helping every developer build world-changing apps. You will socialize your thinking with the CPO and the broader executive team.

• 15+ years experience in Product Management, and 10+ years in a leadership role
• Strong communication, interpersonal, public speaking, and leadership skills.
• Demonstrated ability to build platforms
• Experience scaling and retaining high performing and organizationally  complex teams, including managing managers
• Comfort navigating and experience influencing at the executive level
• Successfully driven high impact, cross functional projects that directly support company-wide initiatives and goals
• Excellent writing skills; our strategic product meetings are based on docs rather than decks.

Reporting to Nate Stewart - Chief Product Officer

Nate is responsible for the overall product strategy and the activities we take to guide Cockroach Labs to product-market-fit. As a former engineer, Nate has seen how the challenges of working with data in unreliable, distributed environments often distract developers from building great things. Nate joined Cockroach Labs to help companies avoid that pain once and for all. When he’s not at work, Nate can be found spending time with his family, reading a book from his Goodreads queue, or trying to remove the rust from his tennis game.

• 100% health insurance coverage (for you and your dependents!)
• Paid parental leave (with baby bucks)
• Flex Fridays
• Flexible time off & flexible hours
• Education reimbursement
• Relocation support

Cockroach Labs is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer building a diverse and inclusive workforce. If you need additional accommodations to feel comfortable during your interview process, please email us at [email protected].