Product Manager

What is Upserve

Upserve is the smart management assistant serving up clear guidance that makes your restaurant thrive. Offering pointed and timely guidance, Upserve makes it easier to manage guests, staff, marketing, finances, and even the menu. It's the magic ingredient for thousands of restaurants.

About the Product You'll Be Leading

• Over the last 6 months, Upserve received NPS scores of +43, +65, +55 +52, +72 +80, higher than any other tech firm selling software to small businesses (see our NPS graph from Delighted). 
• Our business is in hyper growth, doubling since last year, with thousands of restaurant customers. 
• Our platform has massive data from which to make decisions: we manage over 11 million meals per month and over 16 million active diners (see our recent press release)
• Our LTV to CAC and our SaaS 'Quick Ratio' both exceed 4 x.
• Our newest product feature enjoys 70% weekly active users and nearly 50% daily active users
• Some of the technologies in our stack include React / React Native, Kinesis, DynamoDB, Machine Learning, RedShift, RDS, Ruby, JavaScript, Docker, ECS, and more. 
• We communicate with customers using tools like Totango, Intercom and Marketo.

About the Product Manager role

The Product Manager is the "CEO of the product." This role reports into Barnaby Claydon, our Director of User Experience. The UX team includes design, front-end engineering, mobile engineering, and product management. You will work closely with our CEO, Angus Davis, who leads the product + engineering teams. Currently you would be the only product manager on our team. In a nutshell, being a great PM comes down to planning the work and working the plan. Two posts sum up what we're looking for: Good PM, Bad PM and How to Hire a Product Manager. During a typical week at Upserve, you would...

• Lead Customer development ... understand customer needs
• Understand the company's vision and goals; translate into product strategy
• Translate strategy into prioritized, stack-ranked initiatives, features, and requirements within features, using tools like Aha.io. Handle interdependencies within a release. Call out and squash risk and ambiguity in the plan. Prioritize bugs / invisible improvements alongside new features.
• Know the competition and figure out how we leave them no room to win.
• Communicate clearly and effectively, to both technical and non-technical audiences, whether it's a Slack message, Google doc, email, presentation, tweet, blog post, spreadsheet or github comment.
• Define whole product requirements. Anticipate the needs of partners, success team, sales and more.
• Collaborate with design/UX team, sometimes creating very low-fidelity mockups on the whiteboard, or skitch, sketch, figma, or whatever works for you
• Collaborate with product marketing peers to set positioning, messaging and communicate the vision to internal and external audiences, such as on our website
• Stay close to our sales team, especially for feature requests (usually, so you can say no)
• Train customer success & support team on product capabilities
• Understand deeply how customers use our product (using Totango, Intercom, interviews, etc.)
• Measure product-market fit after launch, to guide iterative improvement
• Create objectives and key results around this work

About you: 

You are as comfortable talking with engineers as you are with customers. You are a leader. You fight for the user! You can walk, chew gum and a bunch of other stuff at the same time (because you've probably stack-ranked these activities ... and if you were to trip, you know which ball would drop). When a new product comes out, you appreciate the decisions and tradeoffs that were made, and ponder alternatives. You are... 

• ...able to contribute substantively to technical decisions led by our engineering team; you understand API documentation... this job doesn't require writing code, but you have "technical chops" to earn the respect of your more technical peers
• Feel a tremendous sense of urgency to get value into your customer's hands, and you tap into that energy to drive, lead and motivate your colleagues to win.
• Passionate about great product. When a product doesn't work like you'd expect, you wonder, "Who was the PM on this?"
• An effective communicator, able to write succinct, clear, unambiguous terms to define requirements. Comfortable writing presentations, documents, blogs, email, Slack, Intercom. You know the right communication tool to use at the right time. You can adapt your message to the audience (internal, partner, customer, press, board, etc.)
• Not afraid of taking risks. "Make better mistakes tomorrow" ... "The biggest risk of all is not taking one."
• Comfortable learning tools like Salesforce, Totango, Mixpanel and others; a metrics-obsessed, systems thinker who uses data to measure success.
• Able to prioritize despite many competing interests by learning what's most important 
• Willing to lead with courage, transparency and empathy (managing by influence is one of the most challenging parts of being a great PM; these leadership traits help)
• Not afraid to kill a project or to say "no."

About Upserve:

• Named by Forbes to list of 100 "America's Most Promising Companies"
• Named "Best Places to Work in Rhode Island" 3 years in a row
• Executive leadership team experienced in scaling SaaS businesses
• Organization is ~100 people strong, based at our Providence, RI headquarters steps from the Amtrak station to NYC & Boston, surrounded by Providence's vibrant arts and restaurant scene.
• Backed by the country's top venture capital investors including First Round Capital, Index Ventures, Shasta Ventures, Greylock Partners, Pritzker Group, Nextview Ventures, Chris Sacca, Alfred Lin, and others.
• Quantify our employee engagement quarterly using Culture Amp, where we outperform the New Tech Benchmark in nearly every category.
• Our team has been inspired by Design of Everyday Things, Hooked, and Don't Make Me Think. We appreciate Little Big Details. We welcome fresh perspectives - these influences are not dogma.
• Some places we've learned about product management include Ken Norton, ProductHunt, Inside Intercom, Drift, Random Jog, A16Z Podcasts, Stratechery, Mind the Product, Nir & Far, First Round Review and SaaStr, to name a few. We even asked them to share this post ;-)

Our competitive benefits

• Free lunch catered daily, snacks, and drinks
• Unlimited time off. Our policy is: "Take the time you need, when you need it."
• Awesome office space in Kennedy Plaza (10 Dorrance Street)
• Choice of paid monthly parking, Amtrak or bus pass 
• Family-friendly flex time, telecommuting and other benefits to balance family & work
• 100% paid medical and dental insurance for employees
• Discounted vision, home, and life insurance
• In-office dry cleaning pickup
• 401K with financial advisory services
• Generous paid maternity and paternity leave

Upserve is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer! We care about improving diversity in tech. What does that mean to us in the context of talent?

• There is a problem with a lack of diversity in tech, and at Upserve.
• We're transparent about gaps in our CultureAmp results, and working to improve
• We seek out diverse communities to source talented candidates for open roles
• We use and recommend tools like Textio to reduce bias in job descriptions (see gender tone for this page)
• We believe in being color brave, not color blind.
• We recognize people learn through many different paths, which is why there are no arbitrarily determined degree requirements for any role at Upserve, including this one
• We don't believe in the "pipeline problem" excuse.
• We partner with a number of local organizations working to improve access to the tech industry for underrepresented groups, including Girls Who Code, Providence IntraCity Geeks, #HackPVD, Code.org, PVD Lady Project, and Rosie's Girls to name a few.
• The above steps are a start, but inadequate. "The thing that I care about is output. You can say whatever you want."
• We welcome and actively solicit feedback, criticism and suggestions to impact and improve diversity at Upserve, and in tech broadly. Please contact CEO Angus Davis and VP Talent Alaina Restivo directly to engage us in this effort (note: please don't send job applications via email). We are serious about this.

Made with ♥︎ in Providence, RI