The posting
ABOUT US
At Pencil, we are driving innovation in advertising technology through our state-of-the-art SaaS product, which harnesses Agentic AI to redefine content creation. Our mission is to make AI the default in advertising without replacing creative people. To achieve this, we need to make sure that our technology isn't just in the hands of big brands - we need to try to help small businesses and creative individuals too.
THE ROLE
Workflows are how most of the creative on Pencil gets made. A workflow is a visual sequence of steps, covering inputs, generation, brand assets, scoring, branching logic and delivery, that a person builds once and runs again whenever the job repeats, on demand or on a schedule. This role owns that product and the connections that feed it, with one goal: more workflows built and run, by more people, across every customer.
You will own Workflows and Integrations. That covers the workflow builder, templates, scheduling and run management, and the steps that workflows are built from. It also covers the platform's third-party connections outside media: digital asset management systems, file storage such as Google Drive, translation services, data services such as Foreplay, and more than a hundred other business tools. You will make those connections part of the workflow itself, so that a run can start from a client's systems and deliver back into them. You will build them on a common framework, so that each new connection is quicker to ship than the last and client teams can build on it for individual clients.
You will also own how workflows show up inside Scribble, our creative agent. Agents can already run as steps inside a workflow. The next step is for Scribble to find, build, change and run workflows on a person's behalf and report back as they run, and for a workflow to pause for a person's decision and act on it. You will work closely with the team that builds Scribble, and you will own the workflow experience it works through, so that a workflow behaves the same whether a person or an agent is driving it. When that works, building a workflow stops being a specialist job.
KEY RESPONSIBILITIES
- Own the charter for Workflows and Integrations: the durable problem, success metrics, and an explicit in and out scope list.
- Grow adoption across every customer, measured by the number of workflows built and run and the number of people building them.
- Make building a workflow simple enough for a marketer or creative to do without help, through templates, guided set-up and defaults that cover the common jobs.
- Own the workflow experience that Scribble works through, so that an agent can find, build, change and run a workflow with the same tools a person uses.
- Make human review part of the run: a workflow should pause for a person's decision, record it, and continue down the right path.
- Make runs dependable at volume, with scheduling, run management, failure handling and clear status, so that a team trusts a workflow to run unattended.
- Own third-party integrations outside media, from digital asset management and file storage to translation and data services, and make them built-in steps in a workflow, so that a run can start from a client's systems and deliver back into them.
- Set the integration framework and standards that client teams build on when they connect a system for a single client.
- Work with customers to find the jobs they repeat every week and turn them into workflows and templates that others can reuse.
- Run the full lifecycle from discovery to post-launch review, with a written hypothesis before every ship and a review against it afterwards.
- Use product data and structured customer feedback to set priorities, working backwards from evidenced customer need.
- Partner closely with design on the builder experience, and with engineering on run reliability and the integration framework. Partner with the PMs who own Scribble, agents and the editor, and with the client teams who build on your framework.
YOUR BACKGROUND
You will have three to five years of product management experience, and you want to own a key product and take it to the next level. You might be a great fit if you can walk us through:
- A product you grew from a small group of power users to broad adoption, and what you changed to get there.
- Shipping a builder, automation or workflow tool, and what you learned about making something powerful easy to start with.
- Building integrations with third-party platforms or APIs: how you chose which to build, and how you kept them working.
- A time you built from validated customer need in a domain you had to go and learn. If your instinct is to start with a demo, this is not the role.
- A decision you changed because the data told you to. Fluent in qual and quant.
- Experience with AI agents or AI-assisted products is a plus.
YOU'LL THRIVE HERE IF YOU…
- Move Fast. You're comfortable making decisions with imperfect information, iterating quickly, and fixing things before they become fires;
- Stay Human. You care deeply about users and teammates, and design with empathy for real workflows;
- Act Like an Owner. You take responsibility for outcomes, not just outputs. You spot problems early and take initiative to fix them.
- Keep It Simple. You fight unnecessary complexity, design reusable patterns, and make hard things feel intuitive.
- Love to Surprise. You enjoy finding unexpected ways to delight users, especially in the last mile of polish and usability.
KPIS & SUCCESS MEASURES
We will measure success through outcomes and quality, not just output:
- Builder share (lead): percentage of monthly active users who build or edit a workflow. Target [TBD]%.
- Workflow adoption (lead): percentage of monthly active users who run a workflow. Target [TBD]%.
- Workflow run growth: month-on-month percentage growth in workflow runs. Target [TBD]%.
- First workflow conversion: percentage of new users who complete a successful run within their first [TBD] days.
- Share of generations through workflows: percentage of all generations produced by workflow runs.
- Agent and human collaboration: percentage of workflow runs built or started by Scribble.
- Connector adoption: percentage of active workspaces that use at least one third-party connection in a workflow each month. Target [TBD]%.
- Integration usage: percentage of workflow runs that start from, or deliver to, a third-party connection. Target [TBD]%.
- Reliability (hygiene bar): percentage of runs that complete without manual intervention, held at or above [TBD]%.
- Learning velocity (supporting): percentage of launches reviewed after release against their stated hypothesis. Target 100%.
BENEFITS
- 25 days PTO plus public holidays, although we operate a Flexible Time Off scheme
- Health insurance / private medical cover
- Monthly stipend towards wellness, fitness, and learning and development
- Remote - work from anywhere in your home country
- Enhanced parental leave policies, whether you become a parent through birth, adoption or surrogacy
- Access to our Pencil office in The Shard, London for our UK employees
- Flexible working hours
DEEP DIVE ABOUT PENCIL
Pencil uses AI to make ads. Our mission is to make marketing effective and effortless. We want to become the default way ads get made - because AI ads are 10x faster and cheaper to make, and 2x better performing, than making them without AI.
We're called Pencil because we believe AI will be a tool for creative people, not a replacement - it may even be as fundamental a tool in the future as the pencil was in the past.
Pencil was founded in 2018 with a team from Google, Facebook and Uber with backing from Sequoia and Entrepreneur First. We were acquired by The Brandtech Group in 2023 to pursue a shared vision of bringing GenAI to the Fortune 500.
https://www.trypencil.com
ABOUT THE BRANDTECH GROUP
The Brandtech Group's mission is to be the best company in the world at helping leading global brands drive growth by connecting content, data and media using technology.
It was founded in June 2015 (as You & Mr Jones) by former Havas Global CEO David Jones, with a simple mission to help brands do their marketing better, faster and cheaper using technology. It was renamed The Brandtech Group in January 2022.
Today it generates more than $1BN in revenue and is the largest global digital content partner for many of the world's biggest brands and companies, often using its unique in-housing model. It works with eight of the world's top 10 global advertisers and 49 of the world's top 100. Clients include Banco Itaú, Danone, Google, Intuit, LVMH, Microsoft, Morgan-Stanley, Netflix, Reckitt, Renault-Nissan, PayPal, TikTok, Uber and Unilever.
In addition, the Group invests in cutting-edge technology companies relevant to and with potential in marketing and has been investing in the AI, AR and the metaverse space since 2015. The Group was the first external investor in Niantic (creators of Pokémon Go), alongside investments in AI Foundation (AI digital twins, personalized AI, and deep-fake detection 2018), Automat (AI chatbots, 2016), Elsy (AI media planning, 2016), Jivox (dynamic automated content, 2016), Crossing Minds (deep learning AI recommendation system, 2017), CreativeX (AI-driven content optimization, 2022), Zappar (AR, 2017), Provenance (blockchain, 2022) and GGP (the world's largest gaming fund).
The Group is one of the most prominent marketing industry voices on the prediction and movement to AI-driven marketing, including Generative AI. It was named one of the World's Most Innovative Companies 2021 by Fast Company, and by CB Insights as one of the World's Most Valuable Private Unicorns.
https://www.thebrandtechgroup.com
