Product Manager, Platform
Perplexity · New York City, New York · San Francisco, California
WHAT YOU’LL DO
- Understand the needs of the teams that use our platforms and the customers who depend on them. Use product data, operational feedback, and recurring quality issues to identify the highest-impact problems, and then solve them.
- Turn recurring needs into shared services, tools, and workflows that reduce duplicated work. Exercise judgment about when to build a reusable capability, use an existing solution, or take a simpler approach.
- Work directly with product, engineering, and operational teams to understand their workflows, identify recurring problems, and anticipate the capabilities they will need next.
- Prioritize platform investments across new product enablement, reliability, efficiency, and technical debt. Make clear tradeoffs between near-term delivery and long-term flexibility.
- Define and track success through business impact, reliability, cost to serve, and reduced manual work, connecting these measures to customer and business outcomes.
- Partner closely with engineering on technical tradeoffs, build-versus-buy decisions, and rollout plans. Write clear requirements and drive delivery from problem definition through launch and iteration.
QUALIFICATIONS
- Experience owning product strategy and execution on technical products and platforms, or shared systems used by multiple teams such as billing and monetization, identity and access, developer platforms, data and experimentation, internal tooling, support, etc.
- Strong technical fluency. You can reason about APIs, data flows, system dependencies, and failure modes, and work closely with engineers on consequential tradeoffs.
- Strong analytical skills. You can investigate problems independently, define meaningful metrics, and evaluate the impact of platform investments.
- Strong written and verbal communication, with the ability to align teams around priorities and make difficult decisions when their needs compete.
- High ownership and sound judgment in a fast-moving environment. You are comfortable moving between long-term strategy and hands-on execution without adding unnecessary process.
- A focus on customer outcomes and product quality, including when your immediate users are internal teams.
WHERE THIS PERSON NEEDS TO SPIKE
- Systems thinker, detail-oriented, problem solver. This person needs to have experience wrangling thorny, complex problems. We need someone that is excited about diving into messy workflows, reading through dozens of support tickets, thinking through edge cases no one’s thought of, assuming different behavior across platforms, proactively considering enterprise vs. consumer workflows, etc.
- Experience working on platforms with multiple stakeholders and non-trivial tradeoffs. This person is building products simultaneously for customers, agents, and other internal employees.
- Is “AI-native.” Can build AI products whose outputs require evaluation, safeguards, and human-in-the-loop design.
- Strong analytical skills and experience defining metrics in ambiguity, breaking down workflows, and using quantitative and qualitative evidence to prioritize.
- Some experience working on critical software: support platforms/agents, legal/compliance tooling, identity and account tooling, billing, fraud, trust-and safety, etc.
- High-ownership. This person needs to feel dissatisfied by the current support flow, and hungry to do whatever it takes to clear the backlog.