Head of Product

Position Summary

This would be a great role for someone who wants to work across the the whole product — from helping plan strategic direction to getting into the weeds on exactly how features should work.

You’d have the goal of improving Empower’s product for friend-to-friend outreach. You’d be the sole product person at Empower, operating with support from our organizing training staff, our engineering team, former product leaders, and the organizations we work with.

For example, you would be responsible for:

• Synthesizing: Building a deep understanding of the organizations we support by talking with them, our internal organizing trainers, and former product leaders.
• Strategy & prioritization: Building out the product strategy and owning product prioritization, working with the managing director.
• Saying no: Making hard tradeoffs about which use cases to support.
• Designing: Translating feedback/needs into changes, and designing clear user interfaces (Empower doesn’t have a separate designer, so product has historically made UI mocks).
• Handing off: Closely working with engineers implementing the changes, and participating in technical discussions over which things are easy/hard (adapting the feature if needed).
• Communication: Owning the delivery and communication of completed projects, building trust internally and externally around product decisions.
• Simplicity: Keeping the product simple.

What’s the organization like?

There are two main teams: product/engineering, and organizing/training. We’re spread out all across the country, with some clustering in the Bay Area and in Madison, WI (you could be anywhere). The product/engineering team has one short stand-up each day.

Here’s the product/engineering team:

• You (Head of Product)
• Sam King (Head of Engineering) – Stanford CS where he started Code the Change; Google; then was part of the Bay Area team that helped save healthcare.gov
• Alex Mattoni – Previously built a container orchestration platform

Diversity, equity, and inclusion are important to our organization. Organizing Empowerment is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate based on age, sex, race, ethnicity, religion, or sexual preference. Women, persons of color, and individuals from the LGBTQ+ community are strongly encouraged to apply. (We’re currently 50% female and 30% non-white.)