Senior Product Manager

Who are we?

Sidewalk Labs is an urban innovation company working to make cities more sustainable and affordable for all. We create products, invest in new companies, and help plan innovative places around the world. Since our founding in 2015, we’ve grown into an organization of over 100 employees based primarily in New York City. Our cross-disciplinary team consists of experts from real estate, urban planning, government, finance, technology, and engineering, among other backgrounds.

We’ve launched innovative companies addressing urban mobility, next-generation infrastructure, and community-based healthcare, and invested in startups working on everything from robotic furniture to digital electricity. We continue to work internally on projects such as factory-made mass timber construction that can improve housing affordability and sustainability, a digital master-planning tool designed to help developers and communities achieve shared objectives, and a new approach to all-electric neighborhoods.

With the potential to catalyze and scale new models for sustainable and affordable growth, our work is both exciting and complex. We are working to achieve something unprecedented — help us build it!

What is the role?

In your role as a Senior Product Manager, you will be a key member of Sidewalk Labs’ product team, working on Pebble, a low cost, privacy-preserving vehicle sensor that enables better parking and curbside management. This will involve deeply understanding market trends/competitors/customers in the urban sensing space, setting goals / OKRs for the team, developing product roadmaps, establishing structures and frameworks for decision making, implementing and iterating on product development processes, dealing with many moving pieces and people (customers, contractors, engineers, designers, other team members), and helping build a product and business that scales. 

You will lead the product roadmap and develop deep partnerships with our software / hardware / firmware leads, UX designers, other product managers, program managers, and subject matter experts (e.g.  architecture, housing affordability, mobility) to deliver products to unlock the true potential of a place. You will work with the overall business lead to help set the direction and implement the processes to take early stage ideas to market. 

What you have to achieve:

In your first month, you will:

• Build strong relationships with the members of your team and understand the dynamics of the organization.
• Build a deep understanding of Sidewalk Labs’ current initiatives and product development  processes, and identify ways to make them more robust.
• Create a set of goals for yourself, aligned around business needs. You will deliver on one new feature, component, or business need. 

Within the first three months, you will:

• Support the team through the development and launch of at least one new product feature, coordinated the process around the upcoming quarter’s OKRs, and collaborated with engineering and design on the refresh of the quarterly product roadmap. 
• Support the sales and marketing team to iterate on their product pitch. 
• Develop an understanding of how to best grow the team.

Beyond three months, you will:

• Continue to evolve as you take on a leadership role in the product team. The types of problems you will solve could include:
  • How can we help cities reduce road congestion?
  • How does air pollution vary throughout a city, and what are the best ways to reduce it?
  • How do we use technologies like self-driving cars, pervasive networking, and environmental sensors to maximize quality of life in the city?
  • How can we build digital products that will help city residents keep themselves healthy?

Minimum Qualifications:

• Know your Product Management.
  • You have a strong background in product management for software and/or hardware teams.
  • You have extensive track record shipping world-class products, ideally across multiple domains from concept to launch.
  • You have strong product intuition and know how to balance the creative with the practical. 
  • You have a deep understanding of the product development process, including defining a product strategy & roadmap aligned around revenue, delivering MRDs/PRDs with prioritized features, and delivering products and features on time and budget.
  • You can identify when making an acquisition, developing a partnership, or investing is a better approach to product development than building in-house. 
• Be obsessed with user needs.
  • Your product discovery process is deeply rooted in observing user needs and creatively solving problems to improve people’s lives.
  • Your product strategies are driven by market demand and business cases, data and user research interviews, surveys, and observational methodologies.
• Have a market & business focused mindset.
  • You become an expert with respect to the competition. You develop core positioning and messaging for the product, perform product demos, and train & brief the sales team and/or press 
  • You can work with other product, business, and sales leads to set pricing to meet revenue and profitability goals, deliver forecasts, develop sales tools and collateral, and propose overall budgets to ensure success. 
• Be a strong, collaborative leader.
  • You have a strong ability to develop focused missions and inspire teams to execute.
  • You are a strong, organized process leader, and an exceptional communicator. 
  • You work closely and collaboratively with other project domains (product, software, design and business development) in a way that aligns goals and expectations across the business unit. 
  •  Your teams and reports hold you in highest regard since you drive teams to deliver their best work, and care about the individuals. 
• Have a bias towards action.
  • Once you’ve sketched out an idea, you find the fastest path to a prototype to prove the concept.
  • Be creative: you’ll come up with new ideas based on your broad understanding of user needs, technological possibilities and city domain knowledge.
• Bring heart to everything you do. 
  • Care about cities, solving hard problems and our team and its success.

We actively seek applicants from underrepresented communities. Even if you are not 100% sure you are right for the role, please apply and we will be happy to consider your application. All employment is based on merit and business need, and we respond to each application we receive.