Staff Product Manager, Developer Experience

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 an experienced and entrepreneurial Staff Product Manager to help us create a brand new developer experience at Cockroach Labs. You'll make our first public SDKs assisting developers in gaining immediate access and value from CockroachDB and own the end-to-end user journeys for developer experience from outside the database by connecting to CockroachDB. You will also improve upon our other developer interfaces, including the driver, ORMs, GUIs, IDEs, etc. Your goal is to improve upon today's developer experience to make CockroachDB the developer's database of choice. Finally, you will interface with sales, marketing, and the developer community to identify partnership opportunities to advance the developer experience using CockroachDB within the border application development ecosystem.

You Will

• Own the end to end user journeys for developer experience from outside the database through connecting to CockroachDB.
• Work with engineering to build and improve upon the SDKs, drivers/ORMs, and other developer interfaces.
• Work with Sales, Marketing, and Engineering to prioritize new ecosystem partnerships and to make sure CockroachDB fits into the broader application development ecosystem.
• Drive adoption of our solutions by working with marketing and other departments to highlight differentiated workflows for developers.

You Have

• 10+ years of PM experience.
• Experience working with SDKs, preferably developing and owning the entire developer experience.
• Experience working with engineering to prototype and iterate on features to improve an end-to-end user journey or workflow in the context of a product strategy.
• The ability to write comprehensive user stories that motivate and guide engineering efforts without overconstraining them.
• 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.
• Excellent writing skills; our strategic product meetings use docs rather than decks.
• Collaborative nature and are an enthusiastic, amiable, and personable teammate, open to partnering with all other functions in the company.
• Computer Science Degree and/or experience as a developer, including working with databases

The Expectations

In your first 30 days, you will go through our CockroachUniversity training program and spend time getting familiar with the specific developer and industry problems your team is solving. You'll work with the Group Product Manager (GPM) for your area and 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 3 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 and start to understand how the user journeys in your area differ between self-hosted and cloud CockroachDB deployments. 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 accessibility@cockroachlabs.com.