Technical Product Manager (Remote)

Location: Remote, mainly UK based, as travel to our London hub will be required from time to time.

Team: Product

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 engineering team is deeply technical, collectively bringing a wealth of experience and broad technology skills across infrastructure, security, distributed systems, and much more. The quality of the product we produce is what excites and motivates us each day. If you enjoy solving hard problems and want to build the infrastructure for the future of the internet, then you'll love working at Ably.

You will be responsible for transforming Ably’s ideas into reality. You will be the expert in our market, our product, and, most importantly, our users. You will uncover the problems that we can solve for our customers and drive the team to quickly bring value to our users while maintaining the level of quality and reliability that our customers expect from Ably . You will also be responsible for the success of your part of the product, and will own the roadmap and strategy for it.

Day to day, you will:

• Experiment and cultivate a deep knowledge of customer problems through research, engagement with the developer community, and customer interviews. You will drive initiatives to validate demand and commercial value of new features, and mitigate known product risks.

• Communicate problem statements and product (solution) requirements to engineering and document them in writing, along with UX wireframes or API scaffolding where appropriate.

• Work with senior managers and the engineering teams to maintain the product and platform roadmap.

• Build and maintain a product strategy that will help the company to achieve its strategic objectives.

• Be embedded within the delivery teams, UX, and engineering to make trade-offs, steward the delivery process, and close gaps in requirements.

• Work with product marketing and wider marketing teams to deliver go-to-market plans for new products and features.

• Define, monitor, and analyze product metrics, and feed learnings back into the development process

• Clearly communicate product plans, trade offs, and results to a wide range of audiences.

• Assume the Product Owner role in our agile delivery process.

• Champion the attention to customer experience in everything we do. For Ably, we focus on developer experience, which starts with the APIs they consume, the documentation we provide, through to the online tooling and support we provide.

• Know what a good product looks like and can articulate your vision to others to help inspire and focus

• Have demonstrable product management experience

• Have software engineering background

• Are able to write code in any modern language to build prototypes that use our APIs

• Have experience defining APIs, writing documentation and building UX prototypes

• Have knowledge of software development lifecycle process and methodologies

• Have knowledge of the pub sub patterns and architectures that involve it

• Are able to clearly and concisely communicate your thoughts and ideas in a written form

• Are familiar with the the market of event streaming and data synchronisation tools and platforms (Kafka, Pulsar, AWS Kinesis)

• Have built a developer focused product (IaaS, SaaS, Cloud API etc) as either Product Manager or Software Engineer in the past

• Have knowledge of Distributed Systems

• Have hands-on experience building systems with event based architecture

• Have experience working at a startup

• Have experience working as a product manager on a very technical product, or as a platform product manager

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.