Senior Product Manager

Job description

Convex is the difference between coding and engineering. As app development becomes commoditized and the nature of applications changes, coding agents need a backend platform that codifies good systems design principles and is accountable for simplicity, correctness, scale and performance so that teams are able to build the applications of tomorrow. This is a very difficult product challenge: Convex needs to be incredibly easy to use both for agents and humans, but has to impose the right constraints that ensure that applications actually work and scale over the lifetime of a company. We’re looking for a product lead to help us shape the agentic/developer experience for the next chapter of Convex. The Team: https://convex.dev/about-us Convex has assembled a team of engineers who have built and designed some of the largest platforms in the world, with exabytes of data, millions of transactions per second, and shipped desktop and mobile software onto billions of devices. We are a group of friendly, collaborative, and passionate people that love working in-person together in our office in San Francisco. The Role: Our team is exceptional at solving hard technical problems. What we're looking for is an exceptional staff or principal-level product leader who can make sure we continue to solve the right ones for our customers. If you're passionate about developer products and have experience shaping product direction at a technical company, we'd love to talk. This isn't a role that sits above the work. Some days you’ll work with our founders on where Convex is headed and how we position it in a market that's moving fast. Other days you’ll dig through usage data trying to understand why a cohort of developers didn't activate, or work with our Head of Ops on how to position a new capability. If you like hard prioritization calls and aren't precious about dropping them when our users need something fixed, you're going to like it here. We can always do better when it comes to gathering metrics and improving our flows, but Convex is also a deeply thoughtful company and a big part of this job is embracing the good taste that is required to design a platform that agents are incapable of doing so themselves. What You'll Do: - Work closely with our founders and engineering team to develop and maintain a clear point of view on what we build and why. - Spend real time with customers to understand what they're building, where they're getting stuck, and what's in the way of them choosing Convex. - Own product analytics and use data to develop conviction about what's working and what isn't. - Work with our CEO and Head of Ops on positioning, messaging, and how we bring new capabilities to market. - Be self-directed in deciding where to focus, in close collaboration with the engineering team and CTO (hi! this is me, James). What Excites Us: - Deep product experience at a technical or developer-facing company, with a track record of shaping direction, not just executing on it. - Genuine comfort with technical depth. You don't need to write code but you need to engage seriously with technical tradeoffs and earn credibility with the team. - A history of spending real time with customers and translating that into decisions that changed what got built. - Strong analytical instincts and comfort forming views from data, even when the signal is incomplete. - Experience owning positioning and messaging for a technically complex product. - Experience as a sole or early PM who has built the function, not just worked within one. - Interest in working in-person at Convex's office in SF. IDEAL CHARACTERISTICS This is an attempt to outline some characteristics of people who tend to thrive at Convex. We have a high demand for conceptual thought and architectural sensibilities, while also having the typical demands of a small startup. DO THEY UNDERSTAND DEVELOPER PRODUCTS? Developer tools are different. Your users are technical, skeptical, and are quick to spot inauthenticity. Positioning that works for a business app falls flat here. We want someone who has internalized what it feels like to be a developer evaluating a product, who understands why "it just works" is both harder to achieve and more important than it sounds. HAVE THEY DEVELOPED TASTE FOR GREAT PRODUCTS? The best PMs we've encountered have a strong point of view on what good looks like and a track record of pushing for it. Not just identifying problems but caring enough to fight for the right solution. We want someone who has shipped things they're genuinely proud of and holds a high bar for what that means. CAN THEY FORM INDEPENDENT VIEWS? Convex is a rejection of industry norms and a belief there's a better way of building apps. A good product manager here needs to think for themselves, to come in with their own read on what customers need, push back on the team's assumptions, and bring perspective that isn't just a reflection of what we already believe. We don't need someone who validates decisions. We need someone who improves them. DO THEY VALUE SIMPLICITY AND CLARITY? The best product thinking is simple. Simple positioning, simple prioritization, simple explanations of hard problems. We have a bias toward doing fewer things better and want a PM who has that bias too. Someone who can make a complicated product decision feel obvious in retrospect. DO THEY KNOW HOW TO WORK WITH FOUNDERS? Founders have to move fast, often hold strong opinions, and need to think ahead of the market. Working well in that environment means knowing when to push back, being direct without being difficult, and building trust through good judgment rather than process. This person will spend a lot of time with our founding team and needs to thrive in that dynamic. Although to be honest we’re a pretty friendly founder team. DO THEY BRING ENERGY TO THE ROOM? Startups are hard. Building something from nothing is hard. Driving forward progress despite uncertainty is hard. Shitting on stuff is easy and just brings everyone else down. We have a high bar for quality but also a high bar for being constructive, positive, and excited about making things better. We're meant to be having fun here. *The salary range for this full-time position is >$240,000 + equity + benefits