Head of Product

  • Full-time

Company Description

The world runs on open source, and projects need more than a version or source control system to scale. The Linux Foundation (LF) has evolved a proven methodology to transform projects into category leaders. Critical projects must have their finger on the pulse of their entire developer ecosystem, with tools tailored to key stakeholders driving project development, including maintainers, contributors, community managers, marketers, and more. The Linux Foundation’s suite of products, LFX, operationalizes this approach, providing tools built to facilitate every aspect of open source development. LFX will one day be the most popular engagement platform to create and grow open source software projects around the world.

Job Description

We’re looking for a product leader who can be a partner to the VP of Engineering and CTO in our efforts to transform how we build products at the LF. You’ll have a team of 4-6 product managers and 4-6 designers reporting directly to you and will be the point person for product strategy and product operations. You’ll be reporting directly to our CTO.

  • Product Culture: Be a fierce advocate for best practices in product management, including user discovery, problem validation, partnership between the product trio, and go-to-market coordination.

  • People Management and Leadership: Strengthen our team of product managers and designers by being a manager that helps them grow as product professionals. Hire people who will continue to raise the bar. 

  • Strategy and Vision: Partner with team leadership on product portfolio strategy to help define and drive the future of our platform. Align and inspire the team to achieve that vision.

  • Voice of the Customer: Develop a deep understanding of the open source industry, users, and target customer base in order to clearly articulate their pain points, challenges, and needs.

  • Focus on Execution: Work closely with our CTO and VP of Engineering to continually improve the processes we use to ship quality software. 

  • Data Driven: Help the company hit its goals through fostering a habit of data-informed decision-making at every level. 

  • Product Evangelist: Expect to be involved in helping grow the adoption of our tools both internally and externally by supporting our colleagues and talking to customers. 

  • Travel: We anticipate that you’ll be attending ~5 team meetings or conferences each year. 

Qualifications

LFX is ultimately a data platform primarily used by people who build open source projects, and so we’re looking for product leaders with experience building data tools, DevOps platforms, or open source software. This is our wish list - if you meet a majority of the qualifications but not all we still encourage you to apply! 

  • Depth of Experience: You should have 10+ years of experience in design and/or product management, with at least several of those leading a team of 5 or more people at the Director or VP level. We are especially interested in people who have worked at mid-sized startups of ~200-500 people.

  • Vision and Strategy: Experience defining a cohesive product mission, vision, strategy, and roadmap for a portfolio of products.

  • Managerial Success: A track record of effectively managing, mentoring, growing, and supporting a team of product managers and product designers.

  • Process Transformation: You’ve helped an organization through an agile transformation in the past, changing its product development lifecycle to lead to improved product outcomes.

  • Ship Software: You’ve shipped successful customer-driven B2B software in the past and can talk to us about the metrics you’ve hit and strategies you’ve used to do so. 

  • Data-Driven: You can talk to us not only about how you’ve used data (both qualitative and quantitative) to make decisions yourself, but how you’ve helped your organizations become more data-informed over time.

  • Dealing with Ambiguity: We don’t have all the answers and neither will you. We hope you can talk to us about times you’ve had to figure things out even when the path ahead has been murky. 

  • Design Chops: You won’t be in the prototypes helping to build designs, but you are going to be managing our designers as well. We’d love to see some experiences where you’ve been in the trenches in the past, or have been a very close partner to designers. 

  • Good Writer: We’re moving more and more towards a written culture, so look for top-notch written communication skills in all our hires. 

Additional Information

The Linux Foundation is a largely all-remote workforce that hires top-notch talent.  We are as passionate of providing a flexible and supportive work culture as we are in Open Source Software.  Collaboration is in our DNA, and we pride ourselves on being able to work closely together while not being tied to an office.  We offer exceptional benefits - e.g., Fantastic health care, Unlimited PTO, 100% 401k match, profit-sharing, and exceptional healthcare plans.

The Linux Foundation is an Equal Opportunity Employer.