At Ashby, the role of Product Managers is different from what I’ve seen in most product orgs. At a high level, PMs are responsible for shipping impactful product changes at high velocity, consistently and over an extended period. When we think about impactful product changes, our primary goal is to remove frustration and add delight.
At many organizations, PMs are required to write detailed specs that handle every edge case. Designers are required to mock up every pixel. At Ashby, it’s different. We believe individual contributors do their best work when they have a deep understanding of the end user and the business, and ownership of the solution. This is reflected in the engineers Ashby hires: they own projects end-to-end and deeply understand the problems they are solving. PMs are expected to give significant white space in their specs. As a result, PMs can spend less time managing tickets and more time with customers and thinking deeply about the product strategy.
At Ashby, PMs need to be the pace-setters for their product areas. This means they bring a healthy level of impatience and time-paranoia to the table. This does not mean cutting corners or demanding that engineers work unreasonable hours. As a PM, you can help engineers by managing the project scope well, identifying when it’s appropriate to bring in help, or being ruthless about prioritization.
In particular for this role, we think it’s unlikely you’ll be able to A/B test your way to the right solution. We think it’s more likely to build great onboarding through deep thinking. A big part of that is research; you should expect to spend a significant amount of your time researching and understanding customer problems, and then a significant amount of time writing down your thinking.
Finally, Ashby isn’t simply an ATS. Right from the foundations, it was designed to be much more than that. It’s a platform modelled around how organizations (from early-stage startups to massive enterprises) think about recruiting, managing, and retaining top talent. As a PM at Ashby, you should, over time, get familiar with our most common building blocks. You’ll invest not only in product improvements but in platform thinking.