Technical Product Manager - Developer Platform

Description

Hi, We’re AppFolio.

We’re innovators, changemakers, and collaborators. We’re more than just a software company — we’re a cloud-based powerhouse that creates products to make our customers’ lives easier. We’re revolutionizing the way people do business, and we want your ideas, your enthusiasm, and your passion to help us keep on innovating. We listen to our customers, it's in our DNA.

Most of our product development teams focus on our company’s customers and their needs. Some of us have internal customers instead: other product developers. This is one of those roles; you’d be joining a college (group of teams) that is responsible for crafting a software development experience that your fellow AppFolio product developers will love so that they can focus their creativity on making our product even more awesome for our company’s customers.

• NOTE: Our major development hubs are based in Santa Barbara, CA and San Diego, CA. However, we're open to exploring remote-first working arrangements in other locations around the United States if relocation is not desired. MUST live in the United States. **
  
  

College Mission

To evolve the architecture of the APM (AppFolio Property Manager) product platform towards supporting clear and exclusive domain ownership and continuous delivery for all teams, empowering all teams to practice safe and sustainable development within their domain, and provide a world-class developer experience.

Team Mission

To improve our ability to deliver better software to customers faster and easier by reducing cognitive load, ambiguity, and uncertainty through consistent well-understood patterns, a reduction of technical debt, and the implementation of APM’s next-generation architecture.

Your Mission

You will discover, prioritize, and inspire the team to execute on a continuous stream of high-value developer experience problems in our day-to-day development tools and process so that product development teams can deliver value to customers with increasing quality, speed, and happiness. You will partner with fellow platform technical product managers to ensure that any recommended frameworks, code patterns, best practices, or guidelines are documented, announced, and adopted. You will partner with engineers from throughout the organization to learn about their problems, and sometimes adopt and generalize their solutions, as a way to continue encouraging their creative problem solving, while removing their obligation to support solutions for our entire engineering organization.

About The Role

We believe that a good leader is passionate about their thing, and gets things done effectively by fostering healthy team dynamics. They work closely with engineers from product development teams and fellow platform teams to build and communicate platform features, priorities, and requirements. This is a high-visibility, hands-on position that requires commitment, ownership, flexibility, careful planning, and attention to detail, all with an engaging, and personal approach. And can we have some fun while we’re doing it? We think so.

Responsibilities

• Work with engineering leaders and technical product managers (peers) from other business segments, to help shape the technical vision and execute on delivering customer value
• Discover, validate, and transform product and developer needs into a strong platform concepts
• Innovate and improve the platform that APM Product Development uses every day by promoting an ecosystem of developer tools and best practices so that best technology is adopted to deliver customer value
• Own a platform product lifecycle from requirements gathering and prioritization through production, delivery, and adoption
• Build business cases that satisfy significant technology needs and efficiency opportunities that demonstrate how platform improvements can provide a competitive advantage. Can pitch on the “what” and “why”
• Provide technical expertise in identifying, evaluating, and developing solutions that are cost-effective and meet product development and business needs.
• Responsible for platform capabilities definition: necessary features and functionality and the release criteria; Studies platform usability, analyzes technology trends to identify new opportunities for platform improvement
• Strives to be a subject matter expert in their strategic focus area(s) by identifying the challenges our developers face and defining new opportunities to improve our developer experience
• Be the go-to source of knowledge for the benefits of adopting new platform capabilities
• Make trade-off decisions between possible and desirable, which requires a developed sense of what is technically feasible
• Engage frequently with product development and fellow platform teams: facilitate discussions, provide clarification, provide input on requirement acceptance and refinement, testing and validation, contribute to design activities and decisions
• Meet with engineering leaders to shape the platform vision, direction, and roadmap
• Partner with engineering leadership and plan for platform improvement launches, collaborating on adoption plans as appropriate for any launches impacting downstream product development teams and processes
• Communicate and share with both internal (inside AppFolio) and external audiences (outside AppFolio) the business problems, developer challenges, and creative and interesting approaches we are taking to fulfill these needs
• Run successful internal product adoption campaigns, driving awareness and benefits of platform adoption
  
  

You know you’re the right fit if you've walked the path our developers are on...

• You have hands-on experience as a software developer and/or a strong technical understanding of cloud technologies, enterprise software development, and how delivery IT-related changes to an enterprise organization
• You can evangelize the value of a well architected codebase. You believe that the developer experience can be elevated when code and related tools are intuitive
• You have an understanding of modern software architecture trends and best practices
• You have informed perspectives on software architecture and can articulate the vision of a platform that provides the best experience for software engineers
  
  

You know you’re the right fit if you exhibit these product manager traits...

• You have excellent organizational skills, analytical capabilities, and attention to detail
• You have strong written and verbal communication and presentation skills, for both technical and non-technical audiences
• You can operate under limited supervision as this individual can operate, drive results, and set priorities independently
• You have a track record of driving and delivering large, complicated projects on time and within scope
• You have the ability to develop and execute a successful product roadmap
• You have an entrepreneurial spirit/ability to roll up your sleeves and try different things with minimal direction
• You have knowledge of key product and program management principles, agile, scrum, and UX centered design principles
• You can balance the needs of UX, DX, and ease of implementation when delivering platform improvements
• You have solid leadership, communication, and presentation skills both written and oral
• You have a proven ability to build strong cross-functional relationships
• You have the ability to collaborate across multiple functions driving toward a common goal
• You possess a unique blend of business and technical savvy; a big-picture vision, the drive to make that vision a reality, and technically credible to lead teams of best-in-class software developers
• You love and understand technology. You stay up-to-date on trends and disruptors in the software development and IT markets
• You enjoy describing, evangelizing and are generally interested in talking about the positive impacts that technology can have
  
  

Additional Skills And Knowledge

• 4+ years in a technical product management role or a software engineering role with product management responsibilities
• Knowledge and understanding of software requirements gathering and use cases development
• Experience with lean product planning and scoping techniques such as user story mapping or design thinking
• Experience with product management roadmapping tools such as Aha, Productboard, or ProductPlan
• Experience with agile development workflow tools such as Trello, GitHub Issues, or Jira
• Familiarity or experience with Ruby or Ruby on Rails
  
  

Our Story

AppFolio (NASDAQ: APPF) was founded in 2006 with the mission to revolutionize vertical industry businesses by providing great software and service. Our easy-to-use, cloud-based software helps our customers more effectively market, manage, and grow their businesses. Our software solutions exist in the real estate vertical, including AppFolio Property Manager and AppFolio Investment Management.

To find out more about what AppFolio has to offer, check out appfolioinc.com/careers.

Statement of Equal Opportunity

At AppFolio, we value diversity in backgrounds and perspectives and depend on it to drive our innovative culture. That’s why we’re a proud Equal Opportunity Employer, and we believe that our products, our teams, and our business are stronger because of it. This means that no matter what race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identification, national origin, age, marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, or veteran status, you’re always welcome at AppFolio.