Junior Product Manager

This is a remote position.

All interested candidates are required to apply exclusively online. Please refrain from submitting your CVs or applications via email or LinkedIn. Applications received through these channels will not be considered.

Makerble® is a digital platform with a mission to give every nonprofit the insights and motivation to continuously improve the positive impact they make on the world. We are looking for a Junior Product Manager, someone who will play a pivotal role in shaping the future of our products. You will be the ultimate problem solver, diving deep into our products, understanding them inside out, identifying areas where users may encounter challenges and coming up with solutions that keep us ahead of the curve.

Makerble® blends Surveys, KPIs and CRM functionality into a simple interface that anyone can understand. Our customers are nonprofit organisations that work around the world and use Makerble to manage and improve their projects. Nonprofits choose Makerble® because our simple UX gives everyone on their team the confidence to analyse data and spot insights; whereas on competitor platforms, those same users would feel that they needed to be a data scientist in order to get the most out of the software. So instead of looking like a traditional CRM system, survey portal or data analysis tool, Makerble® looks much more like a social media platform. This was a strategic decision to make Makerble® appeal to the masses and it’s the kind of decision that you’ll be making in your role as a Junior Product Manager. We worked with UI designers to bring our idea to life visually and it has led to much of the success we have had over the last 10 years.

As a Junior Product Manager you will be responsible for making strategic decisions that affect the design of Makerble. We are looking for someone who can understand our clients’ functionality requirements, imagine how they could be achieved within the Makerble® platform and communicate these ideas to colleagues, including CEO, CTO, UX Designers and Developers. Because you will be communicating your ideas to our developers and UX designers, it is essential that you know (or learn) how to create low-fidelity wireframes (e.g. black and white sketches that communicate your ideas for how features could work on Makerble). For clarity, we do not require you to be a UI/UX Designer; your role is to communicate rough ideas quickly and clearly e.g. using Google Slides; rather than create pixel-perfect designs in Figma. Because colleagues and clients will come to you with questions about whether and where to add new features to our software - it is essential that you have the ability to understand the entire functionality of our software including how features work together. For clarity, we do not expect you to be a Developer; but we do expect you to master how to use our software and be willing to communicate using the terms used in our database and backend.

This role is suited to someone who is passionate about problem-solving and possesses among other things, four key traits; the empathy to spot customer insights, the imagination to propose new features that solve customers’ problems, the lateral thinking to figure out how your ideas could work in reality and the humility to adjust your ideas based on feedback. With these four traits you’ll be able to imagine what the future could look like for a tech4good startup and solve problems that enable nonprofits to flourish.

Key Responsibilities:

• Meetings with clients (nonprofit organisations) to gather their feedback on Makerble®
  

• Working with colleagues to gather their feedback from clients
  

• Reviewing product analytics to understand the extent to which users are engaging with Makerble® in the way we intend them to 
  

• Competitor analysis
  

• Keeping up with trends within SaaS (software-as-a-service) and related industries
  

• Proposing improvements to existing features and new ideas that address clients’ problems and/or capitalise on gaps in the market and/or address insights from the product analytics data
  

• Working out how new features and feature improvements will work within the existing Makerble® ecosystem - i.e. understanding the existing functionality in detail and using that knowledge to propose ways of connecting existing features to new features.
  

• Briefing developers to create new features and improve existing ones
  

• Briefing UI/UX designers to create high-fidelity wireframes for features. 
  

• Checking that wireframes proposed by UI/UX Designers make sense strategically
  

• Prioritising the features that should be worked on over the coming year and discussing the rationale for those decisions with the CEO and CTO
  

• Helping your colleagues within Makerble® understand clients’ needs and requirements
  

Role Overview: Your manager will be the CEO.

Requirements

Essential

• Ability to understand clients’ requirements and propose solutions that require the least amount of effort to implement. For example, showing a client how they can achieve something using existing features on the platform so that we don’t actually need to build something new. 
  

• Appetite to understand all the features within Makerble® and ability to propose ideas for features that work with existing features.
  

• Ability to imagine the journey of how different types of data travel through the platform. Willingness to understand the different database tables that store various types of data across the platform; and ability to discuss how those tables could better connect to each other in a way that enables your ideas to be implemented. 
  

• Ability to simplify complex requirements into intuitive user journeys so that users can achieve what they need to do in the fewest number of clicks and without needing to read extensive user guides. (Your user journeys can be communicated as simple black & white sketched low-fidelity wireframes, created in simple drawing tools like Google Slides rather than Figma)
  

• Ability to explain your ideas to other people. Ability to create diagrams that show how things connect to each other conceptually. Willingness to write briefs, low-fidelity wireframes and explanatory videos that enable your colleagues to understand what needs to be done without the need to have a question & answer meeting with you to talk through your ideas
  

• Willingness to proactively seek feedback on ideas and make adjustments based on feedback from users and colleagues
  

• Willingness to master the following software tools that we use on a daily basis: Jira, Confluence, Slack, Trello and Google Drive
  

Desired but not essential

• Bachelor's degree in a relevant field (e.g. UX Design, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related discipline).
  

• Proven experience in troubleshooting and problem-solving in a technical or innovation-driven role.
  

• Project management experience