Staff Product Manager, Database Foundations
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’re looking for a Staff Product Manager to lead the DB Foundations product area. In this role, you’ll deepen CockroachDB’s appeal in the database market by aligning the roadmap toward targeted investments for improving CockroachDB’s Performance, Scalability, Cost, Resilience and Stability.
There are an infinite number of ways to use a database, especially for a general purpose OLTP database like CockroachDB. You’ll be responsible for bounding that infinite space, bringing clarity and focus to the unbounded problem through strategic research, structured analysis and market segmentation, and translating those focus areas into product outcomes. Working with engineering teams, you’ll execute a roadmap to achieve those outcomes. You’ll then work with the marketing, education and revenue teams to ensure that value is captured in the market, thus making CockroachDB even more successful and differentiated and putting CockroachDB on the best path to sustainable growth.
You Will
- Work directly with customers to understand and address their primary pain points, collecting product requirements and documenting customer needs.
- Develop and execute a product strategy for Performance, Scalability and Cost characteristics, prioritizing across a variety of deployments and customer workloads, and influencing company-wide product development to ensure a cohesive user experience across the entire CockroachDB experience.
- Collaborate with Engineering and Test Engineering to bolster Resilience and Stability of CockroachDB with a structured approach to investments in test infrastructure and product functionality.
- Manage a roadmap by translating that strategy into targeted outcomes, prioritizing product requirements and working with your engineering partners to execute towards achieving those outcomes.
- Become the expert in the database’s core characteristics and best practices and partner with Engineering, Documentation, Marketing and Technical Field teams to map database characteristics to optimal database configuration and setup to achieve customer workload needs.
- Put yourself in our users’ shoes and set up CockroachDB clusters and database scenarios to acceptance test performance, scale and cost attributes and before they go live.
The Expectations
In the first 30 days, you’ll go through PM onboarding with your roachmate. You’ll shadow the PM lead for your area and understand the team culture and processes. You’ll spin up a CockroachDB cluster, getting a sense for the end to end experience yourself. You will work with the PM lead 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.
After three months you’ll be leading the product area. You'll identify, research, and iterate on segments of the market by performance, scalability and cost needs. You’ll have structured the approach toward a more resilient and stable product. You’ll analyze product data and conduct customer calls to further focus our efforts on creating the most impact and start to understand how the various deployments – CockroachDB Self-hosted, CockroachDB Dedicated and CockroachDB Serverless – map to those priorities. You’ll partner with the engineering team to understand the systems affecting performance and identify blockers to key DB Foundations goals. You’ll manage the prioritization of targeted goals and outcomes for DB Foundations in a cohesive roadmap and partner with your engineering counterparts on the execution plan. You’ll partner with your Test Engineering partners on your first benchmark analysis of performance, scalability and cost characteristics for a specific workload and convert those into production recommendations.
You Have
- 8+ years of total work experience, with 4+ in Product Management.
- An ability, eagerness and desire to dig into intricate technical concepts and tie the impact of technical trade-offs to user experience trade-offs.
- Experience segmenting a market to home in on a strategic focus, and installing and executing on that strategy across teams within the company.
- Experience collaborating with Enterprise customers to understand problems, address those problems and set proper timelines and expectations around feature delivery (including saying no).
- Excellent writing skills; our strategic product meetings are based on docs rather than decks.
- An eagerness to partner with all other functions and product teams in the company.
- A computer science degree and/or first-hand experience working with production distributed systems or databases.
The Team
Reporting to Michael Wang, Group Product Manager
Michael loves understanding and solving users’ problems–the more complex the better. From his past experience as a Data Scientist and Product Manager, he was one of those users -- fighting flaky cloud database products, waiting a full day for the analytics warehouse to be updated. Michael joined Cockroach Labs to be part of a team addressing those problems and enabling world-changing, cloud-native applications. Outside of work he enjoys spending time with his family hiking, biking and skiing the mountains of Park City.
Nate Stewart - Chief Product Officer
Nate is responsible for the overall product strategy and the activities we take to guide Cockroach Labs to product-market-fit. As a former engineer, Nate has seen how the challenges of working with data in unreliable, distributed environments often distract developers from building great things. Nate joined Cockroach Labs to help companies avoid that pain once and for all. When he’s not at work, Nate can be found spending time with his family, reading a book from his Goodreads queue, or trying to remove the rust from his tennis game.
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].