Product Manager (Technical)

What We Do

Overleaf is a social enterprise that builds modern collaborative authoring tools for scientists — like Google Docs for Science. We have over nine million registered users from around the world. Our primary product is an online, real time collaborative editor for papers, theses, technical reports and other documents written in the LaTeX markup language.

How We Work

Overleaf is remote-first — all founders and staff work remotely. We also have an office in Farringdon for those in the London area, and we get the whole team together a few times a year for face-to-face time.

We encourage flexible working. Our core hours are 2pm–5pm UK time, during which our development and product teams have 10–15 minute daily standup calls.

We always collect user feedback to inform our work. We have UX professionals on our team, and we run surveys and user interviews on a weekly basis to inform our Product Discovery process. You can read more about how we introduced these methods in this blog post.

We have a flexible roadmap that we review quarterly, which includes regular user-facing releases. Our Product team works closely with everyone in the company, often as part of a Product Trio (Product, UX, Engineering, with other departments as needed) to understand every aspect of how we can best deliver value to our users. Our roadmap also includes initiatives driven by staff and quarterly hackathons to keep our learning fresh.

The Product Team

We are an interdisciplinary team made of product managers, UX designers and data analysts. We are a relatively new team, with most people joining in 2021, and small enough that everyone has a few hats to wear, but large enough that we have experts who can guide the rest of the team in their area, such as User Research, User Experience or Analytics. Some of us come from a teaching background, marketing, engineering, QA and more disciplines, which gives the team its unique flavour. Our mission is to explore the future of Overleaf through data, design and research.

About This Role

As we expand, we are growing the product team to let us have owners for each of our core areas, namely Editor, B2C growth, Institutions and Enterprise. For this reason, we are now looking to hire an experienced Product Manager who can lead our discovery and development initiatives across one of these areas. You will take ownership of researching, understanding and delivering value to our users, enhancing their workflows for both our hosted SaaS and on-premises solutions. As part of a Product Trio (Product, UX, Engineering - plus others), you will map opportunities using product discovery methods and shape your own roadmap and KPIs. You will lead on projects related to your area of expertise from start to finish. This will usually involve:

• Understanding user needs:

  • Carry out primary research to understand users and their pain points, identifying opportunities to address them.

  • Nurture and grow our rich database of user insights, mining data as needed and present it to stakeholders in various contexts.

  • Based on research insights, formulate hypotheses to be tested with a variety of qualitative and quantitative methods.

• Shaping and developing solutions:

  • Shape a vision, define the problem and align the team with clear goals, objectives and user stories.

  • Map and test assumptions with a variety of qualitative and quantitative methods.

  • Distil existing user research data to support the team in making the right decisions.

  • Work closely with UX designers, data analysts and engineers throughout the release process, from shaping to building, testing and releasing.

  • Clearly define measures of success for A/B testing, balancing the need for accuracy with shipping value to users quickly.

  • Recognise and celebrate success regularly when things go well, while fostering a growth mindset when things don’t go so well.

  • Lead and facilitate planning sessions with your team to prioritise work, often applying decision-making frameworks (e.g. RICE).

  • Keep other stakeholders informed as progress is made, through regular demos, Show & Tells and presentations.

• Understanding the Business. You will specifically own the relationship with a core department (e.g. Sales and Account Management teams for the Institutional/Enterprise core area, or Marketing for our B2C Growth area):

  • Develop and manage a solid product roadmap for your core area.

  • Map opportunities and manage input from your stakeholders to enhance our offering on an ongoing basis.

  • Clearly communicate our roadmap and product changes in advance of their launch and help them manage communications to customers.

  • Take part in customer onboarding sessions, webinars and/or sales negotiations and use these opportunities to conduct user research.

• Work closely with other departments to:

  • Help them access and understand product information (e.g. releases for our On-Premises product, key features, product roadmap).

  • Explain technical dependencies and how they may affect our roadmap.

  • Help them access product data/metrics that can provide useful insights for their departments.

  • Bring the user perspective in meetings and engage stakeholders with our continuous user research efforts and insights.

• Strategy and planning:

  • You will input and contribute to the main product roadmap and take part in planning meetings on an ongoing basis.

  • You will develop a set of strategic goals and KPIs for your core area on an annual basis, updating stakeholders on progress throughout the year.

• This year, we are excited about:

  • Having launched our most popular feature yet, a way to detach the PDF view in another window, which allows users to work on multiple monitors.

  • Relaunching our core editor in CodeMirror 6 for improved functionality and accessibility.

  • Enhancing the collaboration experience on our product to make it even more compelling for individual users and Enterprise teams. We are currently testing assumptions around shared spaces.

  • Collaborating with more partners to enhance the editing experience through new technologies.

We also got excited when our UX team won a prestigious award for delivering a seamless integration between Overleaf and ShareLaTeX!

Who You Are

• Experienced in Product Management as a discipline. You can switch from managing demanding stakeholders to resolving technical trade-offs with the Engineering team, always bringing the focus back on our long-term vision and delivering user value.

• Technical. You are familiar with LaTeX or willing to learn about LaTeX and its use within academia and industry. You also understand the difference between a SaaS product and its on-premises counterpart, including their underpinning technologies, e.g. Docker.

• Commercially minded. You have commercial experience within a B2C SaaS product and/or Enterprise. For example, you are able to read user research insights through a commercial lens, with a view to grow the business while shipping value to users.

• Empathetic. You are curious about people and their stories. You are able to understand user and stakeholder needs, while still being able to push back or negotiate as necessary.

• Data-driven. You enjoy finding ways to measure success and dig into data to make decisions. Whether it’s from a survey, a database or a user interview, you are comfortable drawing insights and presenting them to your stakeholders.

• Self-motivated. You are a natural at making plans, keeping people aligned along the way and thrive when you see a vision come to life.

Our Vision and Values

Overleaf's success is driven in large part by the strong ethos and shared philosophy of our team. It's why we can support a community of over ten million users, who love the platform, and it's how we've grown rapidly into a sustainable, market-leading business.

In late 2018, with input from our whole team, we decided to write out a short set of core values for what it means to be part of Overleaf, and how we wish our company to be seen by our users, customers and partners.

It’s impossible for this short list to represent every value that’s important to each of us at Overleaf; we all have many nuances and individualities that make us who we are. Even so, there are themes that run across the whole team and underpin everything that we do, right through the company.

At Overleaf, we aim to be…

• Friendly, open and approachable — if we can help, we do.

• Collaborative and innovative — with a love of science & learning.

• Trustworthy and professional — but not corporate.

• Sustainable, scalable and reliable — both as people and in our tech.

• Making our users’ lives easier — by putting the user first.

• Remote-first and flexible — to working styles & personal lives.

We're an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to race, colour, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran or disability status.

How We Hire

The stages in our hiring process are typically:

1. We ask you to submit a CV and a cover letter stating why you would like to work for Overleaf.

2. We will aim to update you on the status of your application within two weeks from when we receive it.

3. We'll follow up by email (or sometimes schedule a phone call) with any questions we have about your application, usually around logistics, your ambitions and your expectations about the role.

4. We'll schedule a more in-depth interview, which is typically followed or combined with a practical assignment. For the practical, you'll have the option of either completing a homework assignment, which requires about one hour of your time before the interview, or doing an exercise during the interview, if you prefer. The exercises are practical in nature, and you can use Google, etc., and ask us questions.

5. We may ask you to attend a second, shorter, interview with our Founders.

6. We'll make an offer. We usually interview in batches, so there may be a short delay while we interview other candidates, but we will try to keep you informed throughout the process.

If you have a deadline, please let us know in your application, and we will try to be accommodating.

Requirements

We require that you:

• Have a minimum of 3-4 years of relevant experience.

• Will work for us full time.

• Will usually be available in our core hours, 2pm–5pm UK time.

• Are based in the UK, EU, US or Canada.

Benefits

• Remote and flexible working.

• Salary £50k–£75k per year depending on experience.

• You would join a small, dedicated and growing team.

• We're substantially (around 80%) open source, so your work will often be on open source.

• We're backed by Bethnal Green Ventures (https://bethnalgreenventures.com/) and Digital Science (https://www.digital-science.com/), through which we're part of a wider community of startups in science, health and ed-tech.

• Our London office is shared with several other Digital Science companies, so there's lots of interesting people to meet, and clubs and sports activities outside of work.

• You will be provided with a choice of a Mac, Linux or PC laptop, along with an additional allowance for home office setup.

• We provide a training budget; many of our staff choose to attend relevant industry conferences or buy training materials.

• We run a biweekly internal seminar series (show and tell) with short talks from staff about their work or personal projects, new technologies and techniques.