VP/Head of Product
Element, United Kingdom

We’re the team behind Matrixthe leading project for secure, open decentralised communication and Element the all-in-one secure chat app for teams, friends and organisations. Our mission is to make messaging as open as email allowing everyone to choose where their data is hosted, enjoy private conversations and ultimately be in control of their own communication.

We build open alternatives to apps like WhatsApp, Slack, Teams amp; more. Our early adopters include The French Government, and open source communities like Mozilla, KDE, GNOME and Wikimedia, while we’re working towards gaining traction in personal messaging.

We build things for everyone, and we know we can’t succeed without a diverse team. Our hiring process is designed to be respectful and give candidates the best chance to show us what you can do. If we ever fall down on this, please let us know.

The Role

We’re looking for an experienced Vice President/Head of Product Management to join the senior leadership team and help us in shaping our product organisation and refine and iterate on our product vision.

You’ll be a true collaborative leader looking to experience the journey of designing and building a word class product organisation.

In your first 6 months you will:

• Collaborate with Senior Leadership to form a Product strategy that aligns with our key strategic goals as an organisation.

• Build on the cultural values of Element, and working with our existing teams, begin to roll out a world-class team and product culture focused on data, rapid feedback, learning, and empathy with users/the business

• Working with the CTO and other Tech leadership, form a company-wide roadmapping and communication process around our work, the value of it, and focused on the impact

• Form high performing relationships with Engineering and Design leadership, creating healthy tensions and feedback loops that make for fantastic end products

• Institute a career path for Product and Product Marketing within Element, training and developing the team

• Work with Marketing on driving a Growth mindset, bringing qualitative and quantitative data into our decision making and executing quickly on high value work

• Build a hiring and team plan to support our Product strategy as Element grows

• Foster key relationships with major stakeholders in Marketing, Content, Sales, and other parts of the company to ensure we're always listening and partnering to solve their biggest problems

Requirements

You might be a good fit if

• You have grown a product organization in a startup environment
• You have a strong track record of shipping products which users love, with bonus points for previously working on messaging products, consumer-facing SaaS platforms or open source technologies
• You have extensive experience using both quantitative and qualitative research methods and know when to reach for which
• You have extensive experience with working with other stakeholders and departments from product marketing, to sales and support
• You collaborate extremely well cross-functionally understanding how to steer disciplines like engineering, design, product, sales and support to work together towards strategic objectives
• You have extensive experience shipping early and often, working closely with technical leads and delivery managers
• You have technical aptitude. While this isn’t an engineering role, you should be able to untangle technical concepts and inform discussions rooted in technically complex problems.
• You have top-notch organisation and multi-tasking skills, used to meet tight deadlines and handle multiple projects
• You’re equally excited to work on both large projects and addressing smaller issues amp; nags which add up to a greater sum of impact than their individual parts
• You’re obsessed with raising the quality bar, and the idea of taking proven amp; powerful technology to rid
• You have many years proving your skills in your craft

Why this role?

1. Now is a great time to join: We’re wellfunded and have rising revenues from a host of interesting customers from The French Government and Mozilla to others we’re not allowed to talk about yet(!).
2. You’ll work on highly visible projects: Our early adopters are in the tens of millions and almost all of our work is opensource and we receive regular feedback from our community of users. We’re figuring out how to best practise ‘open design’ in open source and you’ll be able to help shape that. We also speak regularly at conferences, meetups and talks.
3. You’ll be joining a small mission-led team with a supportive culture. In this role, you’ll work alongside talented engineers, designers, amp; other senior stakeholders sharpening your skills.

Job Rewards and Benefits