Product Manager, Sandboxx Letters

Job description

Sandboxx builds consumer technology that supports service members and their families across the full military life cycle. We operate at national scale, work closely with the Department of War and the broader military ecosystem, and serve millions of users each year. We are looking for driven, curious people who take ownership of their work, move quickly, and want to build products that have real impact for the military community. ## Job Description Sandboxx is the leading platform dedicated to finding and building technology solutions throughout a service member’s military life cycle. We’re looking for people with drive and initiative who are excited about building great technology and creating meaningful experiences for service members and their families. Come help us build meaningful solutions for the military community. ## About Sandboxx Sandboxx exists to help service members and their families stay connected during military life. We build tools and media for moments that can feel isolating, emotional, and life-changing, and we do it with care for the people on both sides of that connection. Each year, Sandboxx reaches millions of service members, veterans, and military families through letters, newsletters, community programs, and digital media products. Sandboxx Letters is at the heart of that experience, helping families and friends turn digital messages into physical letters delivered to recruits during military training. ## About the Role The Product Manager for Sandboxx Letters will own the continued growth and evolution of one of Sandboxx’s most established and important products. This is not a role where you are starting with a blank page. Letters is a proven product with real customers, established workflows, operational complexity, and years of history. Your job is to understand what already works, identify where it can be better, and determine where the product should go next. You will own the product from customer insights through execution, working closely with Engineering, Design, Marketing, Customer Happiness, Operations, Finance, and Fulfillment to improve the customer experience while driving meaningful business outcomes. You will be expected to understand how people use Letters, where friction exists, what drives conversion and repeat usage, and where new opportunities exist. You will turn those insights into clear priorities, requirements, experiments, and product decisions. This role requires curiosity, judgment, analytical thinking, and ownership. You should be comfortable moving between customer problems, product data, technical conversations, operational realities, and business priorities without losing sight of the person using the product. We have a strong preference for in-person collaboration at our Middleburg, VA headquarters. However, we are open to considering remote candidates for the right fit, based on experience, capabilities, and alignment with the role's needs. ## Why We’re Hiring For This Role Now Sandboxx Letters is a mature, proven product with an opportunity for its next stage of growth. As Sandboxx continues to expand its reach across the military life cycle, we need a dedicated product owner focused on improving Letters: enhancing the customer experience, increasing engagement and usage, identifying new opportunities, and ensuring the product continues to evolve with the needs of military families. This role exists to bring focused ownership, product discipline, and customer insight to that work. ## What You’ll Do - Own the product strategy, roadmap, and ongoing evolution of Sandboxx Letters - Develop a deep understanding of Letters customers, their behaviors, needs, pain points, and motivations - Use product data, customer feedback, research, and business performance to identify opportunities and prioritize work - Define product requirements, success criteria, and KPIs for new features, improvements, and experiments - Work closely with Engineering and Design throughout discovery, development, testing, launch, and iteration - Drive product and business planning across Engineering, Marketing, Customer Happiness, Finance, Operations, and Fulfillment - Prioritize product opportunities based on customer impact, business value, technical complexity, and operational realities - Evaluate opportunities to improve acquisition, conversion, engagement, retention, and repeat usage - Analyze market trends, customer behavior, competitive products, and potential partnerships - Build clear business cases for product investments and make thoughtful build, buy, or partner recommendations - Develop and maintain product timelines, priorities, and cross-functional dependencies - Ensure teams understand what we are building, why it matters, and how success will be measured - Partner with Marketing and other teams on go-to-market strategies for product launches and improvements - Monitor product performance after launch and use results to determine what happens next - Identify opportunities to simplify the Letters experience and remove unnecessary customer friction - Communicate product decisions, priorities, tradeoffs, and results clearly across the organization ## What We’re Looking For - 3+ years of product management experience, ideally in a high-growth startup, technology company, or consumer product environment - Proven experience owning products through the full product development lifecycle - Experience working closely with Engineering, Design, Marketing, and operational teams - Strong analytical skills and comfort using data to identify problems, evaluate opportunities, and make decisions - Experience defining product OKRs and measuring product performance - Strong understanding of customer discovery, product requirements, prioritization, experimentation, and iteration - Ability to translate customer and business problems into clear product requirements - Strong written and verbal communication skills - Ability to influence and create alignment across teams without relying on formal authority - Strong organizational skills and comfort managing multiple priorities and dependencies - Working knowledge of Agile product development practices - A high level of ownership and accountability for outcomes, not just delivery - Curiosity about customer behavior and a willingness to challenge assumptions - Willingness to work in person from our Middleburg, Virginia headquarters is strongly preferred; remote candidates may be considered for the right fit ## What Success Looks Like ### First 30 Days: Context, Customers, and Product Understanding Success in the first month is not measured by how quickly you change the product. It is measured by how well you understand it. - Develop a deep understanding of Sandboxx’s mission, customers, and military recruit journey - Learn the complete Letters customer experience from purchase through printing, fulfillment, and delivery - Understand the product’s current performance, KPIs, economics, and major customer segments - Review existing product research, customer feedback, support trends, analytics, and historical product decisions - Understand the technical and operational systems that support Letters - Build strong working relationships with Engineering, Design, Marketing, Customer Happiness, Finance, Operations, and Fulfillment - Identify key assumptions, unanswered questions, and areas requiring deeper investigation - Demonstrate curiosity before jumping to solutions ### By 60 Days: Ownership and Prioritization At this stage, success looks like moving from learning the product to actively owning it. - Establish a clear view of the highest-priority customer and business opportunities for Letters - Take ownership of the active product roadmap and backlog - Clearly articulate product priorities and the reasoning behind them - Define or refine the core KPIs used to evaluate Letters' performance - Independently lead product discovery and cross-functional product conversations - Translate customer problems into clear requirements and potential solutions - Begin advancing prioritized improvements through the development process - Establish a consistent cadence for communicating product priorities, progress, and results ### By 90 Days: Execution and Learning By this point, success is demonstrated through execution and the ability to turn what you learn into action. - Fully own the Letters roadmap and product priorities - Ship or meaningfully advance initial product improvements - Establish clear success metrics for product initiatives - Use customer feedback and product data to evaluate early results - Identify opportunities to improve conversion, engagement, retention, or repeat usage - Coordinate effectively across Engineering, Design, Marketing, Operations, and Fulfillment - Make thoughtful tradeoffs when customer, business, technical, and operational needs compete - Build internal confidence that Letters has a clear and accountable product owner ### By 6 Months: Product Growth and Discipline At six months, success looks like measurable improvement and stronger product discipline. - Demonstrate measurable progress against core Letters KPIs - Develop and maintain a clear roadmap tied to customer and business outcomes - Establish a repeatable process for customer discovery, prioritization, development, launch, and measurement - Use experimentation and product analytics to validate assumptions and guide investment - Identify meaningful opportunities for product growth or expansion - Improve the customer experience by removing known friction points - Strengthen collaboration and clarity between Product, Engineering, Marketing, Customer Happiness, Operations, and Fulfillment - Surface clear insights about customer behavior and product opportunities to leadership - Make confident recommendations about where Sandboxx should—and should not—invest in Letters ### By 12 Months: Growth, Strategy, and Leadership At one year, success is defined by the impact you’ve had on both the product and how Sandboxx approaches it. - Deliver measurable improvement in the performance and customer experience of Sandboxx Letters - Establish a clear long-term product strategy for Letters - Demonstrate meaningful progress in customer engagement, retention, usage, or other agreed-upon business outcomes - Identify and validate new opportunities for Letters growth - Build a strong understanding across Sandboxx of Letters customers and their needs - Raise the bar for product discovery, prioritization, experimentation, and measurement - Become a trusted product partner to Engineering, Design, Marketing, Operations, Customer Happiness, and leadership - Help determine how Letters fits into the broader Sandboxx product ecosystem and military life cycle ## What You’re Like You are curious before you are certain. You want to understand why customers behave the way they do before deciding what to build. You ask questions, look at the data, talk to customers, and challenge assumptions - including your own. You take ownership of outcomes. Shipping something is not the finish line. You care whether it worked, what customers did afterward, and what should happen next. You can create clarity from ambiguity. You are comfortable when there isn’t an obvious answer. You can take competing customer needs, business priorities, technical constraints, and incomplete information and turn them into a clear path forward. You are analytical without losing sight of the customer. You are comfortable with metrics, funnels, experiments, and business performance, but you understand there are real people behind the numbers. You communicate clearly. You can explain why something matters, what needs to happen, and what tradeoffs are being made. Engineers, marketers, operators, and executives should all understand where the product is going and why. You collaborate without waiting for permission. You build strong relationships across teams, bring the right people into decisions, and keep work moving without needing constant direction. ## Ideally, You - Have managed a consumer-facing mobile or web product - Have experience growing or improving an established product rather than only launching products from zero - Have worked in a startup or high-growth technology environment - Have experience with e-commerce, transactional, subscription, marketplace, or digital-to-physical products - Are comfortable working closely with engineering teams and understanding technical constraints - Have experience with product analytics, experimentation, user research, and customer feedback tools - Have experience improving conversion, engagement, retention, or repeat usage - Understand how operational systems can affect the customer experience - Are comfortable balancing near-term optimization with longer-term product strategy - Enjoy working cross-functionally and taking ownership through execution - Care deeply about building products that have a meaningful impact on the people who use them ## You Might Not Be a Fit If - You prefer managing a backlog over owning product outcomes - You want Engineering or leadership to determine the roadmap for you - You make product decisions primarily based on instinct without validating them through customers or data - You consider a feature finished once it ships - You struggle to prioritize when multiple teams have competing requests - You prefer clearly defined problems over environments where you need to discover the problem yourself - You are uncomfortable making tradeoffs or saying no - You prefer working independently from Engineering, Marketing, Operations, or other cross-functional partners - You need significant structure or direction before moving work forward ## Preferred Qualifications - 3+ years of product management experience - Experience managing consumer-facing mobile and web products - Experience with product analytics and experimentation platforms - Experience conducting or partnering on customer research and usability testing - Strong understanding of product discovery and modern product development practices - Experience in defining and monitoring product KPIs - Experience with e-commerce, payments, subscriptions, or other transactional consumer products - Experience working with operational or fulfillment-dependent products - Familiarity with Agile and Scrum methodologies - Experience working in a startup or rapidly evolving product environment - Strong presentation and stakeholder communication skills ## Bonus Points For - Experience with digital-to-physical products or fulfillment workflows - Experience building products for military members, veterans, or military families - Familiarity with the military recruit and basic training journey - Experience working on products where emotional connection and trust are important parts of the customer experience - Experience improving a mature product with an established customer base - Experience identifying new revenue or product expansion opportunities within an existing product - A genuine connection to or interest in the military community ## Compensation, Benefits & Perks - Equity incentive plan - 401k with matching and sharing - Top-tier health insurance and family benefits - Flexible paid vacation - Paid parental leave - The opportunity to work alongside the Sandboxx team from our Middleburg, Virginia headquarters We look for people with a good sense of humor and zest for life, especially during interviews. Sandboxx is an equal opportunity employer. We hire based on merit, capability, and potential, and we believe people do their best work in an environment that values curiosity, accountability, and continuous improvement. We do not discriminate on the basis of any legally protected characteristic, and this commitment applies to all aspects of employment including recruiting, hiring, promotion, compensation, and termination. Sandboxx provides reasonable accommodations for qualified candidates who need assistance during the hiring process. For recruitment agencies: Sandboxx does not accept unsolicited resumes from agencies. Please do not forward resumes to our jobs alias, employees, or any other Sandboxx contact. Sandboxx is not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited submissions.