Product Manager, SQL Schema & Migrations
Databases are the beating heart of every business in the world.
Cockroach Labs is the creator of CockroachDB, the most highly evolved cloud-native, distributed SQL database on the planet that scales fast, survives anything, and thrives anywhere. We created CockroachDB to unshackle teams from the constraints of their database. Join us on our mission to enable every developer to build world-changing applications!
About the Role
We are looking for a Product Manager to build an excellent developer experience for our cloud-native distributed SQL database. You will own the end-to-end user journeys and user experience for SQL schema design and iterations (e.g., DDL, new schema objects), SQL schema changes (e.g., online and transactional), and database migrations including defining and executing against a product roadmap. You will interface with developers daily and advocate on their behalf to help CockroachDB provide an excellent developer experience.
You Will
- Work directly with customers to understand and address their primary pain points as well as diligently collect product requirements and document customer needs.
- Collaborate with Engineering, Design, and Documentation to come up with cloud-native solutions and iterate toward a delightful user experience.
- Put yourself in our users’ shoes and acceptance test features before they go live, to prioritize and iterate on usability gaps.
- Leverage our BI platform to understand product adoption and prioritize enhancements to improve our product.
- Drive adoption of our solutions by working with marketing and other departments to highlight differentiated workflows for developers.
You Have
- 3-5 years of total work experience in a technical, product, or business capacity with exposure to engineering and/or design teams.
- Computer Science Degree and/or experience as a developer, including working with databases
- Excellent writing skills; our strategic product meetings are based on docs rather than decks.
- Familiarity and comfort using SQL
- A collaborative nature and are an enthusiastic, amiable, and personable teammate, open to partnering with all other functions in the company.
- The ability to communicate the unique value proposition of your product area to support Marketing and Sales teams. You will periodically produce content to drive adoption and awareness of particular features.
The Expectations
In the first 30 days, you will go through PM onboarding with your roachmate. You will shadow the Group Product Manager (GPM) for your area and understand the team culture and processes. You will spin up a CockroachDB cluster and test core features, getting a sense for the end to end experience for yourself. You will work with your GPM as well as our customers to understand the major user pain points for the area and spend time getting familiar with the specific developer and industry problems your team is solving. You’ll review your backlog, get up to speed on in-flight features, and learn how to understand feature adoption using our analytics platform.
You’ll also build relationships with the tech leads, other product managers, and members of the broader organization that you’ll be working with day-to-day. You and the SQL GPM will have the first of many long-term career planning conversations to understand your goals and how Cockroach Labs can best help you achieve them.
In your first 60 days, you will work with the SQL GPM to drive monthly product-market-fit meetings, which require you to summarize your team’s progress towards our OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) and synthesize what you are hearing from customers and internal stakeholders like Sales Engineering. You will start to vet new feature requests and add them to the backlog.
After three months you will be fully integrated into the team. You'll identify, research, and test solutions to problems. You will analyze product data from alpha releases to determine where to focus our efforts to create the most impact. There are countless opportunities for us to invest in, and you will be responsible for prioritizing the ones that will exceed our customers’ expectations while generating a competitive advantage over the long term. We want our users to have a phenomenal experience using CockroachDB and that requires excellent products built by you and your team.
The Team
Reporting to Andy Woods, SQL Group Product Manager, Cockroach Labs
Andy is responsible for the overall roadmap for the SQL product area, which covers the primary developer interface for using CockroachDB. User journeys in this area include connecting to the database, schema design & migration, SQL coverage, query performance (including cost-based optimizer and execution engines), query introspection (why is my query slow?). Additionally, Andy is also responsible for the multi-region experience inside CockroachDB, including the SQL abstractions and underlying technology that make CockroachDB a globally distributed database. Andy joined Cockroach Labs in 2017 to help build our core database offering. When not at work, Andy enjoys a good book, movies, Crossfit workouts, and the new puppy that keeps him on his toes.
Our Benefits
- 100% health insurance coverage (for you and your dependents!)
- Paid parental leave (with baby bucks)
- Flex Fridays
- Flexible time off & flexible hours
- Education reimbursement
- Relocation support
Cockroach Labs is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer building a diverse and inclusive workforce. If you need additional accommodations to feel comfortable during your interview process, please email us at [email protected].