Senior Product Manager

ODK is an open-source platform used by thousands of organizations worldwide to collect billions of data points for disease surveillance, supply chain traceability, environmental monitoring, and more. It enables teams to build powerful forms and reliably collect structured data, even in places with little or no internet connectivity.

About the job

We're looking for someone who brings dedicated product leadership and uses their experience to shape product practices that fit our globally-distributed team. The team is small, collaborative, and experienced, so this role combines strategic thinking with hands-on work alongside designers, developers and testers.

ODK has been in use for 18 years. We have a mix of self-hosted users and SaaS customers across many sectors, who typically use the platform to meet their social impact goals. A key part of your day-to-day will be finding effective ways to learn from this diverse community, including people we don't regularly hear from. You'll also need to explain, often in public, the tradeoffs we're making when deciding on priorities.

One major area of focus will be evolving how organizations manage users, permissions, and collaboration across forms, data shared between forms, and other resources. This will require understanding workflows across organizations as different as health ministries, agricultural coops, and academic research teams, whose users may have very different vocabularies for describing similar needs. You'll need to translate those needs into a coherent vision for how the concepts fit together, then work with designers and developers to turn that vision into incremental improvements.

Must haves

A strong candidate must have the demonstrated ability to:

• understand users deeply, including their organizational goals and underlying needs behind their requests.
• generalize disparate user needs into opinionated features, not just more configurability.
• work closely and iteratively with designers and developers.
• communicate your product thinking clearly to users.
• set a long-term vision and use it to guide near-term decisions that create user value.
• actively seek out the information needed to make good decisions, while being comfortable deciding with thin evidence when more information isn't available.
• make principled tradeoffs between user needs, technical constraints, business sustainability, and long-term product direction.
• help an experienced team reach and commit to decisions when there are strongly held, differing perspectives.

Nice to haves

We would appreciate demonstrated experience with:

• products that serve users across very different sectors
• complex products such as B2B software or products for technical users
• open-source products or communities
• software that's self-hosted
• working remotely and asynchronously

What we offer

Join a team with immense social impact. For this role, we're offering:

• Contract type: Full-time contractor (30 - 40 hours per week)
• Location: Remote, with at least 8 hours a week of overlap with Pacific Time working hours and flexibility to meet with a distributed global team and user base
• Rate: USD $90-110 per hour, depending on experience

How to apply

To apply, send your resume to jobs@getodk.org with the subject "Senior Product Manager". In the email, provide a written overview of a complex feature you managed and the similarities you see to the ODK context.

Promising candidates will get 1-2 short interviews and a short paid project. If those go well, we will pursue a more long-term arrangement.