Product Lead

What we are looking for in a Product Lead

Product Leads are leaders of people and complex engagements that are still ready and eager to be hands-on (i.e., not just a master of what you do, but also how and why). You likely started as a practitioner and have led other capable people but have made a conscious decision to keep your sleeves rolled up instead of taking an isolated management role. You are curious about the product and engineering landscape and still probably experiment with new tools, products, services, and frameworks in your free time to keep a pulse on the evolution of technology and productivity. You are excited to be in front of clients, and love telling value-based stories in presentations or demos with minimal support. And you’re equally excited to teach others your tips and tricks.

The power of Product Leads at Headstorm:

• You are a culture leader and have an indefatigable attitude when motivating colleagues
• You are the ultimate farmer within enterprise client relationships and are expected to be the first call when that senior stakeholder moves to another company or lands on another project
• You are excited to develop sales skills and are first to raise your hand to develop strategic proposals
• You get excited about mentoring high potential and high performing people and proactively do so (formerly and informally)

• You love the idea of being a teacher, helping to shape and deliver continuous learning that levels up the entire company

What do Product Leaders do on Headstorm engagements?

Lead Consultants & Clients

• You shape, organize, and communicate an end-to-end view on the value creation of a consulting engagement; whether we’re exploring new domains and testing POCs, building data pipelines, relaunching applications, shaping a data transformation, redefining DevOps or any variant therein. You own the engagement.
• You translate business outcomes into workplans that you and a workstream leader can both execute on and learn from.
• You help clients prioritize and articulate outcomes over effort. You can help clients simplify their product vision, and at a minimum help them envision a sequence of events.
• You know when and how to communicate to executive and operating teams, highlighting the critical metrics that show progress and impact as well as motivating your stakeholders and constituents towards valuable action

Discover & Define

• You are deep on customer research and insights gathering, but equally excited to organize the data in an efficient and collaborative manner with teams & clients
• You love collaborating with designers, and while you may not push pixels, you’ve developed mental models for modern and inclusive design
• You naturally want to understand what the competition is doing, and have a secret superpower for synthesizing innovative designs & experiences using the inspirations from within and beyond your clients’ industries
• You are excited to create both back of napkin and rich business cases to establish value. You understand the fundamentals of pricing.

• You can spot and articulate market trends, as well as the segments within those trends
• You are a natural design thinker and are fluent with the basic mechanics, e.g. stakeholder maps, concept maps, personas, etc.
• You lead double-diamond diverge/converge sessions to harvest potential value from diverse contributors and then homing in on the most valuable and viable next steps

Test & Validate

• You can keep everyone aligned and comfortable as we move an experience (with or without a UI) from messy idea to proof-of-concept to enterprise MVP to pilot and beyond
• You understand how to employ in-market testing methods on existing products, then visualize data and analytics as they become available, articulating value-driven reasoning on why features and functionality should or should not be built
• You always question and answer, “are we building the right product?”
• You know how to test prototypes at all degrees of fidelity

Deliver

• You keep teams clear on the value & impact of what they’re building (the why beyond the what)
• You are prepared and practiced in virtual collaboration tools, e.g. Miro, Figma, Zoom, Office
• You create product roadmaps, get hands-on with feature definition and story building, and understand mechanisms to prioritize when resources are constrained

• You know when it’s likely time to buy a component vs build one, and equally good at explaining your rationale internally or externally
• You know how to frame a 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, and 1 quarter answer to any ask

What have you likely done to be successful at Headstorm in this role?

• 
  You probably have been a visual designer, UX researcher, engineer, architect, data scientist, or product manager in an industry setting for at least 10 years
• You have specifically run and executed products in market for 2 years
• You have led technical teams in blocks of 6 months before moving on to another project/product overseeing at least 2 releases
• You have probably conducted 100 customer interviews in your career

• You have built or at least heavily contributed to a customer journey
• You may not have setup analytics or research end-to-end, but you interpreted the data and presented it to VP or higher stakeholders at $1B companies
• You have worked under time constraints and return expectations similar to a venture-backed startup
• You have managed a team that was dynamic and often ramping into a new technology, process, or approach