Product Manager (Operations)

New York City · Full-time · In-person

Your mission

Be the operational backbone of the team.

Shelf is becoming a more complex system: connectors bring in user-authorized context, user representation makes it legible and editable, and an app platform lets people put that understanding to work. The team needs someone who can keep that shipping machine clear, coordinated, and moving quickly.

Your job is to create enough structure that Design can focus on craft, Engineering can focus on shipping, Growth on growing Shelf and Leadership can focus on the highest-leverage decisions.

This is a highly collaborative, facilitation-oriented role with substantial ownership. We expect it to grow into broader operations leadership as the company scales.

What you'll do

1. Run the product operating system

• Run sprint planning across so priorities, ownership, and capacity are clear.
• Own the backlog as a living artifact: keep work scoped, sequenced, and understandable enough to be picked up cold.
• Facilitate rituals and working sessions with clear agendas, named decisions, owners, and follow-through.
• Own release coordination, QA readiness, launch checklists, release notes, and cross-team communication.
• Be the person people can ask when they need to understand what is shipping, what is blocked, or what needs a decision.

2. Stay one step ahead

• Identify coordination failures, unclear ownership, missing decisions, and operational bottlenecks before they become expensive.
• Know when a problem is genuinely unresolved and when the team is simply avoiding making a decision.
• Simplify processes aggressively. We want less process with higher reliability, not more ceremony.
• Build lightweight systems and automations that let a small team operate at much greater scale.

3. Own user insights & learning rituals

• Own the rhythm of reviewing product metrics: help the team understand what they mean, what is changing, and where we need to act.
• Keep distributed user research moving by helping teammates define questions, follow through on research, and share findings.
• Synthesize research, support feedback, and product data into a current, shared understanding of user needs. Use product judgment to identify the patterns that matter.
• Bring those insights into planning, helping the team prioritize improvements and return to the results after shipping.
• When an opportunity needs focused ownership, take a metric and drive improvement with the team, from diagnosing the problem to testing changes and reviewing impact.

4. Help an AI-native team operate in top 1%

• Help the team develop better operating patterns as software development itself changes.
• Make sure AI increases speed without producing low-quality artifacts, unclear thinking, or work that nobody truly owns.
• Use AI aggressively to compress administrative work, synthesize context, maintain artifacts, and improve throughput.

Ideal Candidate

You’re likely a good fit if you:

• Are a heat-seeking missile for pain. You have a very high tolerance to pain and are able to drive through it to get shit done fast - bringing others along with you with a positive spirit.
• Have several years of experience in a role requiring operational rigor across product, design, and engineering teams, such as being a founder or on an early founding team, in product management, technical project management, or adjacent work.
• Thrive in the hairy middle. You can hold ambiguity without letting resolvable decisions linger.
• Are warm, collaborative, low ego, and trusted by very different kinds of people.
• Are genuinely energized by operational craft, but have no interest in process for process’s sake.
• Are obsessive about execution and detail. Missing owners, broken links, unclear tickets, and dropped threads bother you.
• Understand how software gets built. You know what a useful ticket, QA pass, launch checklist, and release process look like.
• Are extremely comfortable with AI tools and use them to multiply your output without outsourcing your judgment.
• Can analyze recurring problems and build systems that remove them rather than repeatedly routing around them.

Role Evaluation Rubric

Ship the product (40%) Reliability. Details. Runs through walls to get things done.

Sync the people (40%) A step ahead. Removes friction. Good people and comms skills.

Shape the product (20%) Signal extraction. User-fluent. Good product judgment.

How we interview

We aim to move fast and focus on simulating what it would actually be like to work together.

1. First Call: A conversation with our CEO about your background, judgment, and the operating environments where you do your best work.
2. Case Interview(s): We do two case interviews. Each a simulation based on real cross-functional operating problems.
3. References:** We’ll ask for 2–3 references. You’re welcome to reference check us too.
4. Final Onsite: An opportunity to come into the office and meet the rest of the team, and work through a simulated situation together.

How to apply

Email [email protected] with your resume and a short description of an operational improvement you made that materially changed how a team worked.

FAQs

• Where will I work?

koodos labs is based in New York City and works together in person.

• What is compensation?

We are planning around $120K–$180K base depending on experience, plus a meaningful equity package.

• What tech stack do you use?

Swift/SwiftUI on iOS and Kotlin/Compose on Android for the clients, TypeScript on Hono for the backend, Postgres via Supabase as our primary data store, and Snowflake as our analytical warehouse. We use Cloudflare on the backend with AWS for heavier data plumbing. For analytics and observability we use Amplitude, Statsig, Sentry, and Grafana Cloud.

• Do you sponsor visas?

Yes.