Senior Product Manager

Given our rapid growth, we are looking for a proactive Senior Product Manager to join the Kraken Flow team. You’ll be the first PM in the Asia/Pacific region, working closely with the engineering team while ensuring a strong bridge with the other teams of our globally distributed product group.

Your product area has not previously operated within a traditional product structure. As such, there is a unique opportunity to shape and define your product area.

You’ll be working with the core workflow engine team. This team owns the service which validates flow configurations and executes them robustly and at scale. It’s a center piece for Kraken Flow, and you will be its first dedicated product manager. The team is dealing with highly technical challenges around scale, resilience, and providing the backbone for keeping configuration flexible and maintainable for our users.

Responsibilities

• Be the product manager of the Engine squad within the Kraken Flow product group.
• Work closely with your APAC-based squad and help shape a strong regional product culture.
• Collaborate closely with developers to ensure that complex technical challenges are met in a way that ensures scalability, resilience, performance.
• Drive the development process, ensuring that products are delivered on time and meet the highest quality standards.
• Participate in strengthening the overall product group in close collaboration with your globally distributed team of fellow PMs.
• Work with stakeholders to align product goals with business objectives and customer needs.
• You’ll work in an international team with people from timezones between the US and New Zealand. Given that you’ll be the first PM in APAC, collaboration particularly with members in the EU timezone will be frequent. As such, you should also expect to have occasional out of hour calls with teams, as well as be familiar with working asynchronously.

As your product develops and matures, your day to day will likely be:

• Liaise with tech, our clients and others to identify how best to manage your product. You’ll spot problems, take ownership and see them through to resolution.
• Gather technical requirements from internal and external stakeholders, define the approach and help write PRDs and tickets so developers can hit the ground running.
• Coordinate discussions on technical proposals and use your own technical understanding to cut through complexity.
• Own the backlog of work to support development of your product. We use Asana to keep track and prioritise what’s up next.
• Report on the progress of products and projects, including new features and your team’s roadmap, across the wider organisation. This involves building, maintaining, and updating success metrics and KPIs to effectively measure and communicate the success and impact of our initiatives.
• Help teams that are working on front-line support to quickly resolve issues.
• Contribute to improving the product management community at Kraken, including thinking strategically and supporting other team members.

Requirements

• Prior experience in product management/ technical product management
• Background in software development, enabling you to be involved in technical conversations and understand nuanced tradeoffs when it comes to system robustness and performance.
• Excellent written and verbal English communication skills, capable of interacting with individuals at varying levels of technical expertise.
• A confident communicator, comfortable collaborating with international teams to achieve global objectives.
• A self-starter with a proactive approach, who sees problems and feels compelled to solve them, can self-learn, and engages with various people in the business to understand global operations.
• Highly organised, methodical, and clear in ensuring projects progress smoothly from inception to completion. Demonstrated ability to manage products from conception through to launch.
• Adaptability to thrive in a dynamic, ever-changing environment.
• Willingness to roll up your sleeves and dive into tasks, from doing your own data analysis, mocking up prototypes, or exploring our logging system.
• We’re looking for people with a variety of skills and experience to build our team, so if you fit some (and not all) of the criteria, please do apply.

Nice to haves

While not specifically required, tell us if you have any of the following.

• Fluency in Japanese, so you can directly communicate with local customers.
• Experience in working with workflow engines, python, event queues or database performance optimization.
• Experience in a fast-paced start-up or scale-up setting.