Focus: B2B SaaS - Customer-centric product management platform

What do we do? We help product managers understand what customers need, prioritize what to build next, and rally everyone around the roadmap.

Location for this role: Remote friendly in Europe (with travel to Prague as needed)

Additional locations: San Francisco, Vancouver, Prague, Brno, London, Dublin

Total Employees: 400+

Customers: 6,000+

Founded: 2014

Website: productboard.com

When we started in 2014, our focus was on product managers in smaller teams who lacked a great product management tool. Today, we are the leading product management platform. We now help much larger companies with thousands of employees, and we deal with quite different needs and personas.

We're facing a huge architectural shift in terms of how we scale our product. To meet the ever-growing demands of the enterprise market, we’re getting ready to redesign our backend. The aim is to make it more scalable and improve the overall experience for our customers — from performance and flexibility to permissions.

Let’s take a closer look at the challenges each of these tasks presents:

Performance
When you launch Productboard in its current state, all the customer location data is fetched into the browser — all the features, all the insights, everything. All the filtering — the aggregation of the data exploration — then happens in the web browser, at the edge of the end-user's computer.

We want to take the business logic that is currently contained in the frontend client of the application and move it to the backend to improve the initial load time. And we want to make sure that the data being sent to the browser is the bare minimum needed to render that screen and serve that particular use case.

As you can imagine, it's a massive architectural shift in terms of how we build the product. This will involve redesigning the backend to make it more scalable and able to provide data on demand.

Flexibility
We’re aiming to get to a place where customers can map their current product development life cycles as well as the processes that help them configure their product workspaces.

We want to make sure that products are completely flexible, allowing you to define your own hierarchy, define the relationships between entities, and easily slice and dice the data.

Permissions
Setting up the appropriate permissions allows product teams to collaborate while maintaining control over their most important or sensitive data.

We need to have a system that will allow customers to define custom roles and restrict permissions on all entities, giving them access to only the data they are entitled to see. We want to guarantee that the backend doesn't allow entities to bypass all the other business rules.

It’s no small task, but for those looking for an exciting and complex tech initiative with a real-world impact, here’s your chance. We won’t be fundamentally changing our tech stack — we’ll be sticking with TypeScript and React.js on the frontend and Kotlin on the backend. But you’ll have a big say in how we shape our architecture for the next eight to ten years.

We're fully running on AWS and Kubernetes, with our frontend written in Typescript/React. We're in the progress of breaking down a Ruby on Rails monolith into microservices that communicate through Kafka message bus. New components are written in Kotlin, with Ruby remaining a first-class citizen in our stack. We are also transitioning to a federated single schema GraphQL implementation for the data-fetching layer.

We work with the following frameworks, tools, and languages:

Frontend: TypeScript, React.js

Backend: TypeScript/Node.js, Ruby, Kotlin, Kafka

Storage: Postgres, Elastic, Redis

Data Pipeline: Python, Keboola, Looker, Snowflake

Infrastructure: AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform

Productboard was founded in 2014 by Hubert Palan and Daniel Hejl with a simple mission: to help companies make products that matter. In the years since, we’ve grown from a handful of people to hundreds, backed by some of the biggest VC firms in Silicon Valley.

Today, Productboard is recognized as one of the hottest tech startups, appearing on the Forbes’ Next Billion-Dollar Startups list and being named the most valuable startup in the Czech Republic by Forbes Magazine.

Productboard seeks to be the system of record for every digital product, providing software that is purpose-built for the product management lifecycle. Product Management is the single driver of growth and innovation in many companies, yet PMs have gone too long being forced to use tools built for other departments and other workflows. We believe Productboard can enable companies to unlock product-led growth with customers and their needs at the center and ultimately build better products faster.

We are targeting a massive and growing market of digital product makers. As software continues to eat the world, the number of digital product makers and the importance of product decisions keeps growing exponentially.

Productboard's paid users are not just Product Managers, but also Designers, Researchers, Engineers, Product Marketers, executive stakeholders, and even members of customer-facing functions like Sales, and Customers Success.

Amongst Productboard's customers are digital native companies like Zendesk, Slack, and Autodesk, as well as companies undergoing a digital transformation like Disney, Quicken Loans, Cartier, McLaren, and Swarovski.

We are building a software platform, but we are also pioneering a whole new category of Product Management systems. Just like Siebel and later Salesforce, created and dominated Customer Relationship Management, Hubspot and Marketo pioneered Marketing Automation, and Gainsight created a new Customer Success category, we have the unique opportunity to create and dominate a new category for Product Management Systems.

• Build Roadmaps
  
• Connect your backlog with always up-to-date and easy-to-share roadmaps
• Prioritize Features
  
• Know what to build next based on user insights and company priorities
• Centralize Feedback
  
• Capture and collect all your customer feedback in one place
• Validate Ideas
  
• Share plans, validate ideas, and celebrate launches with a public Portal
• Integrations
  
• Enable efficient workflows with best-in-class integrations and APIs

• You have 10+ years of experience in services, product development, or infrastructure. The ideal candidate has significant software-as-a-product, web scale delivery, database, distributed architecture, and software engineering experience.

• A strong mentor to junior staff, with the ability to lead and teach others to ensure technical alignment.

• You have a deep understanding of the fundamentals required to build highly available and scalable services.

• You understand – and can articulate and lead conversations on – the benefits and associated trade-offs between asynchronous and synchronous processing, various methods for sharding and segmenting services, and how to foresee, plan for, and prevent scaling bottlenecks.

• You have 5-10 years of design experience with medium to large-scale containerized / Linux operating system production environments, preferably as part of an online service (SaaS) provider environment.

• You have a solid financial acumen – you should understand the cost trade-offs of various technology decisions.

• You can demonstrate a solid understanding of cloud technologies and strategies to scale SaaS products, with a focus on reducing operational costs and time to market.

• You can articulate the value of virtualization technologies, big data systems, cloud platforms, and enabling services.

• Experience using iterative development fundamentals, including experience with SCRUM, Agile or other iterative approaches.

• You have demonstrable competency in modern languages and frameworks – e.g. experience with React.js using Typescript, Ruby, Java, Kotlin, Kafka, PostgreSQL, Elastic – Cache / Search, Redis, AWS, or Kubernetes is a plus.

• Demonstrable experience building, evolving, maintaining, and operating high-volume SaaS products.

Hubert Palan, CEO / President

Hubert is the founder and CEO of Productboard. Driven by a passion for building truly excellent products, he started the company back in 2015 when he saw a hole in the market for a dedicated product management platform. Prior to Productboard, Hubert was VP of Product Management at GoodData. Passionate about sharing his knowledge and experience, Hubert mentors and advises startups and judges teams at entrepreneurship competitions. He frequently speaks at his two alma maters – the University of California, Berkeley, where he got his MBA and certificate in Entrepreneurship, and the Czech Technical University, where he received an MSc. in Computer Science. In a past life, Hubert worked in management consulting. Fun fact: he once trained 20 national park managers in Vietnam on ecotourism marketing. Originally from the Czech Republic, Hubert now lives in the San Francisco Bay area with his wife, Jenna, and their two young sons, Hubert V and Nicholas.

Daniel Hejl, CTO & CISO

Daniel is the CTO and co-founder of Productboard. Before teaming up with Hubert Palan to build the company from the ground up, Daniel was a Senior Software Developer at Trumaker. He graduated from the University of Economics in Prague, where he earned an M.S. in Information Technology and Systems. When he’s not developing the next Productboard, Daniel enjoys helping budding entrepreneurs build excellent products. He mentors at Startup Weekend and various other events, where he helps startups and product teams solve complex technical challenges. Having spent time in Berlin and San Francisco, Daniel now lives in Prague, the Czech Republic.

Loïc Houssier, SVP of Engineering

Based out of San Francisco, but is originally from France. He is coming most recently from Firstbase, another Kleiner Perkins company, where he’s been a customer and a big fan of Productboard!

Before Firstbase, he spent six years at Docusign where he’s seen a massive scale and complexity both from engineering and organizational perspective. He is incredibly passionate about our mission and understands the massive opportunity we have ahead of us in building a scalable, extensible product management platform.

Loïc lives in San Francisco with his wife and three kids. In his spare time, he enjoys cooking, gardening, traveling and hiking!

Sebastien Giroux, CFO

Sebastien Giroux is a seasoned finance executive with experience in a wide range of environments, including start-ups and Fortune 500s, M&A integrations, IPOs, and turnarounds. He has experience in building financial foundations, teams, and processes for high-growth companies in the technology industry. He has a proven record of creating and executing a strategic vision that unifies Finance efforts with GTM, Operations, Product, and other areas to drive business success. Giroux was most recently Chief Financial Officer at Collibra and previously held strategic financial management positions at Atlassian, RingCentral, and IBM.

Kate Walsh, SVP of Customer Success & Support

Kate Wash is SVP of Customer Success, Support, & Professional Services. Throughout her career, she spent 11 years at HubSpot where the company grew from a 50-person startup (500K) to an IPO (600+M). She also worked at Klaviyo (where the company grew from 180M to 400M in revenues) and, most recently, at wellness startup, Thrive.

Dave Killeen, VP of Product

Dave Killeen is our VP of Product. He leads our global charter for all of Product and Design. Dave has over 20 years of experience in product management across multiple sectors, including media, dating, health, and fintech, in both B2C and B2B. 

Greg Strickland, COO

Greg Strickland is Chief Operating Officer at Productboard, where he oversees GTM execution and works alongside Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success to drive operational excellence across the entire organization. He most recently served as an advisor to some of the most innovative startups, including Loom, Preset, and Grain. Prior to that, Greg was COO at Periscope Data and GM and VP of Global Operations at Box.

Stu Gammon, SVP of Sales

As the SVP of Sales, Stu leads the global sales organization. Prior to Productboard, Stu was a CRO at Soldo, VP Sales for Northern Europe at Box and held senior roles at QlikTech and McAfee prior. Stu now lives with his family in London, but is in the process of relocating to the US.

James Lee, VP of Finance & Operations

James joined Productboard as VP of Finance and Operations in March 2020. He is responsible for the company’s financial and internal operations functions, including accounting, strategic finance, and business analytics. Prior to joining Productboard, James held senior leadership positions at Wonderschool and GitHub, where he built and scaled finance and business operations functions from the ground up, while also helping out with fundraising and M&A efforts. Previously, James was an investor at Accel-KKR and an investment banker at JP Morgan. Originally from Seoul, South Korea, James has been living in the San Francisco Bay Area for over 20 years. He is a loyal fan of Philz Coffee, the Golden State Warriors, and his alma mater, the University of California, Berkeley, where he got a B.S. in Industrial Engineering & Operations Research.

In February 2022, we closed our $125M Series-D round, backed by VC giants like Dragoneer Investment Group, Tiger Global Management, Index Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, and Bessemer Venture Partners.

• Ilya Fushman, Partner at Kleiner Perkins
  
• Jan Hammer, Partner at Index Ventures
  
• Andrew Reed, Partner at Sequoia Capital
  
• Byron Deeter, Partner at Bessemer Ventures
  
• Nina Achadjian, Partner Index Ventures
  

• Eoghan McCabe, CEO and Co-Founder of Intercom
  
• Des Traynor, Chief Strategy Officer and Co-Founder of Intercom
  
• Clark Valberg, CEO at InvisionApp
  
• Larry Gadea, CEO and Founder of Envoy
  
• Michael Stoppleman, SVP Engineering at Yelp
  
• David Sacks, Craft Ventures, Paypal COO, Founder & CEO, Yammer
  

6000+ customers love Productboard. Read their success stories here:

• 1-800 Contacts
  
• Avast
  
• Axon
  
• Delivery Hero
  
• Fastly
  
• HERE Technologies
  
• Metromile
  
• UiPath
  

We have a point of view on Product Management and we are highly differentiated on several dimensions:

• Customer-centric product management - Unlike the old-school feature-focused approach to product management (e.g. Aha) we lead with the modern, customer-centric approach to product management that is far superior because it puts the customers and their pain points at the center and significantly increases the chances of building the right product.
  
• Comprehensive and modular Product Management System - Unlike some of the utilities that focus just on a small part of the product management process (Roadmapping utility like ProductPlan, Roadmunk, or research repository like Dovetail, EnjoyHQ), we deliver a comprehensive and modular system for Product Management that supports the whole product management workflow.
  
• Purpose-built Product Management Platform - Unlike the engineering task management tools, generic project management tools, or generic no-code software (JIRA, asana, airtable, etc), we focus specifically on the needs of modern digital product managers.
  
• Open platform - Unlike traditional closed applications, we are architecting Productboard as an open platform with APIs that make it easy to integrate PB into existing workflows, integrate with existing systems, get data in and out, and that allows IT and developers programmatically extend and control Productboard's functionality.
  
• A standardized approach to Product Management - Unlike anyone else, we pioneer a standardized approach to Product Management based on a collection of best practices adopted by the industry's best product organizations - the Product Excellence Framework.
  
• Delightful user experience - We understand that the only sustainable long-term differentiator and a competitive moat is user experience (and delight specifically) and we invest heavily to deliver a product that is superior in the execution of both functionality and usability. Our product satisfies the needs of product managers with superior functionality and with unprecedented delight.
  
• Collaboration across the whole company - We understand that Product Management is a team sport and a highly collaborative endeavor across the entire company. We are building a system not just for the core product team, but for anyone who is interested in the Product's progress or who wants to contribute market insights.
  
• Brand and community - We are not building just a software product, we are building a community of exceptional product makers. We are inspired by the legendary products out there and the relentless product teams behind them. We stand for excellence in the craft of Product Management. We aspire to inspire, guide, and delight all product makers out there, to do the best work of their lives.