The posting
Hi, I’m Geo, Ashby’s VP of Product. I joined Ashby August ‘26; read more about why I joined here. https://www.ashbyhq.com/blog/all/a-letter-from-chris-geoghegan-on-joining-ashby I’m hiring for multiple Product Managers who will report directly to me. More on the specific product areas below.
At Ashby, we have a unique approach to building products https://www.ashbyhq.com/blog/culture/ashbys-operating-principles. As a PM, your primary goal is to eliminate frustration and bring delight to our customers. You’ll work with engineers who deeply understand the customer and business problem and own the solution end-to-end. This means that you spend less time writing detailed specs and more time with customers and doing deep product thinking.
Our unique approach is working. We’re growing >100% year over year and have notable customers such as Notion, Linear, OpenAI, Shopify, and Snowflake. Our growth and retention metrics are best in class among our peers. We’re backed by amazing investors like Y Combinator, Elad Gil, Lachy Groom, and many more!
PRODUCT AREAS
From day one, we have aimed to build "all-in-one and best-in-class" software for Talent teams. In addition to building a multi-product foundation from day one, we have also focused on enabling customizability and power-user features while keeping Ashby easy to get started with. Doing both is an ambitious undertaking!
We want to continue down this ambitious path in future and add multiple new products, which means we:
- Are not just building a product, we’re building a platform
- Need to find a balance between re-usable building blocks and feature-specific behaviour
- Blend enterprise customizability and ease of use
We also want to continuously delight users. We hear "I never thought one could fall in love with an ATS" quite often, and we want to keep that true for all future products we build.
We are looking for Product Managers who can own the roadmap and strategy for the following areas:
1. Outbound Sourcing: You’ll build a platform that enables teams to hire sourcing agents directly from Ashby. Customers simply write the job description, and agents start booking calls with highly qualified candidates.
2. Product Platform: Ashby was designed from the beginning as a multi-product platform. We’re looking for a PM to establish this team and own the shared building blocks, foundational capabilities, and APIs that let product teams move quickly.
3. AI Platform: You’ll own the Ashby Assistant, Ashby MCP, and the AI platform used across many product surfaces. You’ll help drive shared primitives, such as AI memory and context.
During the interview process, we’ll determine which role you're best suited for. We’re also advertising this opening as Staff Product Manager. Both titles describe the same position; please apply once using the title that best reflects your experience.
YOUR ROLE
- Drive Impact: Deeply understand our customers and ship impactful product improvements and investments to maintain our strong velocity.
- Quality: Apply your strong product taste and sound judgement to deliver solutions that are both powerful and a joy to use. Use your judgment to identify areas where we need to improve quality before shipping.
- Prioritization and Strategy: Maintain a roadmap to ensure engineering is never blocked, and set a compelling strategy and vision for the next 6-18 months.
- Customer Research: Spend time with customers and customer-facing teams. Synthesize customer feedback, research, and competitive intel to drive smart prioritization choices.
- Execution Excellence: Set the pace for your product area by identifying bottlenecks, scoping effectively, and driving projects toward high-impact releases. Stay close to engineering work to navigate tradeoffs, manage technical risks, and resolve execution challenges.
- Cross-functional Collaboration: Partner across go-to-market teams to bring the features and products your team builds to the market. Anticipate and plan for the needs to help inform pricing, marketing, and customer support.
- Ownership and reliability: follow through on commitments, manage time ruthlessly, respond promptly to stakeholders, and communicate proactively when priorities or timelines change.
YOU COULD BE A GREAT FIT IF
- You have an unnatural curiosity and excitement about the end-user and the jobs they do
- You bring an Engineering mindset to product problems and can think through edge cases and understand how to extend our underlying platform to create leverage
- You can demonstrate taste - you care about the quality of the products you build and use
- You're an excellent writer and synthesizer; you bring product knowledge and clarity to the entire organization and enable Engineers with product insights
- You can build a thesis for prioritization and communicate priorities using a sound strategy that combines principled thinking, research, and data
- You leverage tools and processes to build operational excellence into your product process
- You have a strong business sense and understand how product and GTM should collaborate, how your features may be monetized, and how product priorities fit into larger business priorities
YOU MAY NOT BE A GREAT FIT IF
- You prefer to specify exactly what Engineering should build rather than give engineers room to own the solution.
- You dislike written documentation and prefer to manage the team via meetings and quick Slack messages.
- You’re primarily interested in shipping features and not thinking through how to make them reusable platform capabilities.
- You don’t enjoy doing deep research yourself and prefer to outsource that UX research, market research, and data teams.
- You’re uncomfortable moving with urgency, making tradeoffs, and reprioritizing when new information emerges.
- You’re primarily motivated by achieving a metric more than delivering a great product experience for customers.
WE WORK DIFFERENTLY
At Ashby, the role of Product Managers is different from what I’ve seen in most product orgs. At a high level, PMs are responsible for shipping impactful product changes at high velocity, consistently and over an extended period. When we think about impactful product changes, our primary goal is to remove frustration and add delight.
At many organizations, PMs are required to write detailed specs that handle every edge case. Designers are required to mock up every pixel. At Ashby, it’s different. We believe individual contributors do their best work when they have a deep understanding of the end user and the business, and ownership of the solution. This is reflected in the engineers Ashby hires: they own projects end-to-end and deeply understand the problems they are solving. PMs are expected to give significant white space in their specs. As a result, PMs can spend less time managing tickets and more time with customers and thinking deeply about the product strategy.
At Ashby, PMs need to be the pace-setters for their product areas. This means they bring a healthy level of impatience and time-paranoia to the table. This does not mean cutting corners or demanding that engineers work unreasonable hours. As a PM, you can help engineers by managing the project scope well, identifying when it’s appropriate to bring in help, or being ruthless about prioritization.
For PM roles at Ashby, we believe great products are built through deep thinking and a clear understanding of user needs. A major part of your role involves conducting thorough user research to uncover underlying customer problems and translating those insights into well-reasoned product strategies.
Finally, Ashby isn’t simply an ATS. Right from the foundations, it was designed to be much more than that. It’s a platform modelled around how organizations (from early-stage startups to massive enterprises) think about recruiting, managing, and retaining top talent. As a PM at Ashby, you should, over time, get familiar with our most common building blocks. You’ll invest not only in product improvements but in platform thinking.
INTERVIEW PROCESS
If this also sounds exciting to you, please apply. We review every application and aim to get back to candidates within 2-3 days. For candidates that advance to the interview process, here is what you can expect:
1. Intro Call - 30 mins
2. Product Experience Deep Dive - 45 mins
3. Product Exercise - 1 hour
4. Final Round Interview - 2 hours Mostly focused on cross-functional Interviews to meet more of the team. This is a critical hire for us and a role that will touch a lot of functions - we want to make sure you'll meet folks you'll be working closely with
BENEFITS
- 10-year exercise window for stock options. You shouldn’t feel pressure to purchase stock options if you leave Ashby —do it when you feel financially comfortable.
- Unlimited PTO with four weeks recommended per year.
- Twelve weeks of fully paid family leave in the US. We plan to expand this to employees in other countries as situations arise.
- Generous equipment, software, and office furniture budget. Get what you need to be happy and productive!
- $100/month education budget with more expensive items (like conferences) covered with manager approval.
- $250/month tool budget plus access to Claude, Cursor, and Codex with generous token budgets.
- If you’re in the US, we offer top-tier health insurance for you and your dependents, with 100% of premiums covered by Ashby. In other countries, we provide high-quality supplemental health insurance for you and your dependents, which is also fully covered by us.
Ashby’s success hinges on hiring great people and creating an environment where we can be happy, feel challenged, and do our best work. We’re being deliberate about building that environment from the ground up. I hope that excites you enough to apply.
To request reasonable accommodations, please contact [email protected].
Ashby provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, genetics, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. We are committed to a diverse and inclusive workforce and welcome people from all backgrounds, experiences, perspectives, and abilities.
Ashby is committed to a fair and transparent hiring process. We confirm that this advertisement is for an active, existing vacancy within our organization. Please be advised that we may use artificial intelligence-driven tools to assist our recruitment team in screening, assessing, and selecting candidates for this position.
