Technical Product Manager

Our everyday digital experiences are in the midst of a realtime revolution. Whether attending an event in a virtual venue, receiving realtime financial information, or working with colleagues in an online collaborative environment - consumers simply expect realtime digital experiences as standard. At Ably we’re not just witnessing this revolution - we’re powering it.

At the heart of our mission lies a commitment to putting developers first. Ably provides a suite of APIs to build, extend, and deliver powerful digital experiences in realtime, delivering billions of messages for millions of devices every day and supporting organizations like Split, Hubspot, Toyota and Genius Sports.

Working at Ably means helping to build the infrastructure and technology that will power and shape the future of the internet. The opportunity in front of us is immense. And we’d like your help.

About this role

As a Technical Product Manager, you’ll drive the success of cutting-edge new products and features that expand the capabilities of the Ably platform. Working with our Innovation teams, you’ll leverage deep technical and software engineering expertise to deliver tools and services that empower developers to build richer experiences with Ably.

You will be the expert in our market, our products and, most importantly, our users. You’ll own the roadmap and strategy for your products, ensuring their growth and success within Ably's expanding ecosystem.

Day to day you will

• Champion a visionary product strategy. You’ll partner with our founders, senior management and engineering leadership to build and maintain a product strategy for your product areas that will help the company to achieve its strategic objectives.
• Advance Ably’s product ecosystem. You’ll collaborate with a talented team of engineers to continuously improve our wider platform offering, formulating roadmap initiatives, delivering new features, and solve interesting and challenging problems relating to developer experience, tooling, account and billing management and other common services.
• Understand customer needs. You'll experiment and cultivate a deep knowledge of customer problems through research, engagement with the developer community, and customer interviews. You will drive initiatives to validate demand and commercial value of new features, and mitigate known product risks.
• Drive exceptional developer experiences. You'll obsess over ensuring that developers have a great experience with Ably - so much so that they talk about us with other developers and compare us to other great developer-first companies.
• Inspire and guide engineering outcomes. You’ll communicate clear problem statements and product/solution requirements to engineering and document them in writing, along with UX wireframes or API scaffolding where appropriate.
• Steward the delivery process. You’ll work closely with our Delivery and Engineering teams, facilitating and contributing to decisions around timelines, trade-offs and how we close gaps in requirements.
• Own commercial outcomes and take new products to market. You’ll work with product marketing and the wider marketing team to deliver go-to-market plans for new products and features. You will drive commercial outcomes for the product(s) you own.

It's important that you have

• Significant previous experience in product management for technical B2B SaaS products, with a track record of driving technical and architectural improvements.
• A background in software engineering and the ability to write code in at least one modern language to build prototypes that use our APIs.
• An understanding of pub/sub and familiarity with distributed systems and event based architectures.
• Strong problem-solving skills and enthusiasm for hard challenges, with the ability to analyze complex situations, identify potential obstacles and determine practical solutions.
• Demonstrable previous experience of roadmap development for a technically complex product.
• A detail-oriented approach to understanding user needs, pain points and behaviors in order to craft exceptional user experiences.
• A hunger for data exploration and a history of using data and analysis to make informed product decisions.
• Experience at a startup or growth-stage company or adaptability to thrive in a fast-paced, agile environment with a focus on rapid iteration.

It would be great, but not essential if you have

• Experience delivering solutions used by developers (developer tools or APIs), or closely related solutions for other technical personas in the software development ecosystem (e.g. DevOps, cloud infrastructure etc.).
• Experience defining APIs, writing documentation and building prototypes.

What’s it like to work at Ably?

We’re tackling planet-scale problems and our ambitions are a testament to that. You’ll join a successful, deeply motivated and collaborative team that thrives on innovation, experimentation and autonomy. To get a sense of life at Ably, visit our careers page. You can also read about the origins of Ably's core values on our blog.

We believe in fostering a culture that's built on inclusivity and mutual respect among all team members, and we recognise that each individual is different and will want to be supported in their role in different ways. We provide a range of perks and benefits to aid folks' development and wellbeing, allowing them to be their best selves and do great work.

• A remote-first and flexible work environment. UK-based teams come together in person once per month in our London hub (next to Old Street) and we get together as a company twice per year. Aside from that, you’re welcome to work wherever suits best for you.
• Equity. We’re a growing start-up and we want all team to members to share in the success of the company through our EMI share options programme.
• Enhanced holiday allowance. Our policy provides Ablyans with 28 days of paid annual leave (27 regular days, plus a day off to enjoy your birthday).
• Enhanced parental leave package, so that you can take the time you need to get to know your new family member, rest and recover.
• Home workstation budget of £500 on joining (and £150 p/a thereafter), so that your home office is set up to serve you well and that you have everything you need to work comfortably.
• Personal learning and development budget of £1000 annually, and 5% L&D time during working hours to focus on improving your skillset.
• Private healthcare with BUPA.
• Medical cash plan to cover a range medical and dental costs.
• Mental wellbeing coaching and counselling from Self Space.
• Monthly wellbeing budget via Juno.
• Life assurance and income protection.
• Access to Tech & Cycle to Work schemes.
• Weekly snack allowance for our end-of-week “Need To Know” meeting.
• A fully-paid one-month sabbatical after five years with Ably.

Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging at Ably

We believe our differences as individuals is what makes us great. Our people are at the heart of what we do, and we encourage everyone to be their most authentic self at Ably: we see inclusivity and openness as fundamental to creating long-term success as an organization. We encourage applications from all backgrounds regardless of age, disability, gender, sexual orientation, parental status, race, religion, educational background or neurodiversity. Ably has an amazing opportunity ahead of us, and we want anyone to be able to contribute to that opportunity.

If you enjoy working as part of a technology company, value open source, and love solving hard problems - then we’d love to hear from you, regardless of whether you fit the job description exactly or not. If in doubt, drop us an email; we’d be more than happy to give you some advice on your application.