Associate Product Manager

About the Role:

The Associate Product Manager – New Grad position is designed to grow undergraduates into product leaders. APMs at Clipboard Health move quickly, with high ownership and good judgment from day 1. Previous APMs have scaled operational processes, written new pricing algorithms from scratch, and built new products all on their own. On their own = they were given a problem → they wrote an excellent plan that solved the problem → they executed that plan with full ownership. 

Our APMs are generalists who work closely with our executive team. Instead of coming in with a toolkit and looking for problems it can solve (which often leads to incremental problem solving), they focus on the biggest problems and quickly devise new ways to solve them from first principles. Doing this from day 1 requires that our APMs are boundlessly curious and jump right into understanding our business, our users, and our product. We think that their curiosity and the ability to dive deep ultimately equips them to be excellent contributors and effective leaders.

Ownership is not given to APMs once we think they are able to lead projects. APMs are expected to lead important projects from the get-go. Their plans and the quality of their execution are met with the same level of scrutiny as that of a Group Product Manager’s. We think that doing the work and getting feedback on it is one of the fastest (perhaps the fastest) ways to learn and grow, but it’s not the best path for everyone. We encourage you to think deeply about if that’s something you want.

I’d read the following docs from our team prior to applying: the Product Team Standards, Product Team Recruiting, and Product Team Structure. These documents will give you a sense of how we think and what we value. We also have more links about team and company culture on our candidate website.

In your first 30 days you’ll:

• Talk to customers, understand their problems, and surface issues we weren’t devoting enough attention to
• Ramp up on the business, the product, and how we work
• Design and run marketplace experiments to validate hypotheses
• Write weekly write-ups and other documentation to keep others abreast of your work

In your first 90 days you’ll:

• Own an important problem on your own
• Write a plan (you may have to write several drafts) that proposes a solution to the problem
• Broadcast the plan to relevant stakeholders, get their feedback, and adjust it
• Execute on the plan and report findings to the executive team

You can’t be successful here if you:

• Don’t enjoy writing. We write a lot, and we hold our writing to a high standard. If you aren’t comfortable being scrutinized on not only the content but the clarity of your writing week over week, our culture won’t be a good fit for you.
• Want to know what to do. In your role as an APM, you’ll regularly be given tasks that are seemingly ambiguous. You will have to use your judgment to bring clarity to it. You may even propose that the task isn’t something we should focus on today. That’s okay too.
• Don’t like working with data or math. As a marketplace company, we have a highly quantitative culture. Our language is steeped in numbers.
• Don’t enjoy talking to customers. We talk to our customers day in and day out. Our customer conversations are an integral part of how we make decisions.
• Don’t want an intellectual challenge. The problems we face are novel and challenging, and we expect people to solve them quickly. If you aren’t looking for an intellectual challenge in your role, this won’t be a good fit.

Benefits:

• Competitive compensation
• Unlimited vacation
• 100% remote with tri-annual offsites