Product Manager, Metabase
More information about location
Open-source Business Intelligence tool
Open for applications
Open-source Business Intelligence tool
21-100 employees
Open for applications
More information about location
21-100 employees
Company mission
Make an easy, open source way for everyone in your company to ask questions and learn from data.
Role
Who you are
- A thorough thinker, able to be both diligent with details but systematic to see the big picture
- Appreciative of clean but powerful user experiences (and the hard work they require)
- Able to keep a vision in mind, but break the path to it into small, doable, valuable steps
- Excited to work asynchronously in a global team, and with the written communication chops to do it effectively
- More interested in the Product than the Management part of Product Management
- Must come from a technical background. Preference is from data analysis or data engineering, but software engineering with experience with databases also counts. PMing these things for a long while can also work
- At least 4 years of experience in a product management role, making software, having been through a few cycles of discovery, execution and iteration. We’re not yet set up to simultaneously train a junior PM and onboard them to the complexities of Metabase. In terms of responsibilities, this is a mid-to-senior PM role
- Driven and able to help others continuously deliver work through influence, not authority
What the job involves
- Develop deep knowledge and empathy for users needs in the areas they tackle. This involves reviewing existing issues, tickets, docs, engaging in lots of interviews and evaluating quantitative data
- Understand the underlying mechanics of the product at a technical level. They don’t need to read/write code, but need to have the curiosity and ability to over time understand how things work and develop instincts for what’s easy/hard
- Develop strategies for solving clusters of users needs in thoughtful ways, ultimately delivering product docs which frame needs in actionable ways for designers and engineers. This is really important
- Steward projects forward, helping keep focus, momentum, and continuously re-evaluating scope, with flexibility and appreciation for technical constraints and UX considerations
- Follow-up on the outcomes of projects they ship, quantitatively and qualitatively
- Collaborate with the rest of the team, consistently seeking and providing feedback, as well as pitching ideas for how to advance the product
- Responsibilities don’t include: managing people, herding cats, writing code, making mocks
Application process
- Candidates apply and are screened based on whether their background meets the minimum requirements. Saying why the role is interesting and supplying a LinkedIn profile go a long way
- Candidates go through a **short written assessment** to calibrate a specific set of technical skills
- If that’s a 👍, there’s a **hiring manager screen**. It’s not a particularly qualifying conversation, but more of a fit evaluation (what the candidate wants, what Metabase needs and can offer)
- If that’s a 👍, the candidate moves to **panel interviews** with different people, scheduled asynchronously. Once the interviews happen, the team meets to debrief
- If that’s a 👍, we move to a **take-home assignment**, shared at the time, to be delivered asynchronously. Once it’s sent, the team meets to debrief
- It’s extremely rare for a submission to be a slam dunk, so after this we have a live conversation to **dive deep into the take-home submission**. Whether to move forward is a hiring manager decision
- If that’s a 👍, there’s a **final conversation with our CEO**, and we make a final call
- The overall process usually takes 3-5 weeks, with scheduling across the board being the main bottleneck. It can in specific circumstances be compressed. If for some reason this process doesn’t work for you, please say so, or potentially consider another role
Otta's take
Sam Franklin
CEO of Otta
Metabase is at the crest of a third wave of Business Intelligence tools: first centralized enterprise architectures like SAP, then self-service tools like Tableau and Looker and now cloud-based, open-source tools like Metabase.
Its open-source nature has helped Metabase reach 98 million downloads. Metabase makes money by offering a number of professional services like managed hosting, support, and assistance with implementing Metabase in a custom analytics or business intelligence setup.
The company is doubling down on its documentation and sales team to help onboard less experienced users and scale beyond their current user base of over 30,000 companies. The challenge for the startup will be capturing significant revenue while sticking to their open-source principles.
Insights
Company
Funding (2 rounds)
Aug 2021
$30m
SERIES B
Apr 2019
$8m
SERIES A
Total funding: $38m
Company benefits
- Remote-first
Company HQ
SoMa, San Francisco, CA
Articles
Founders
Sameer Al-Sakran
(CEO)Graduated from Stanford with an MS in Scientific Computing and Computational Mathematics. Worked as a Software Engineer and Genetic Programming researcher before founding a Facebook Ad Tools startup in 2010. Worked with multiple VCs and startup studios, lastly Expa from which Metabase was spun out of.
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