[Hiring] Senior Product Manager @Astera Institute

Role Description

We are looking for a senior product manager to join the Discourse Graphs team, in a fully remote, fixed-term role of 12 to 18 months, paying $110,000 to $195,000 a year depending on where you are based.

You'll join a small and friendly distributed team of engineers, designers and researchers who are designing, building, and testing new ways of doing collaborative science. We do most of our work in writing, across many time zones, and there are no managers: engineers pull their own work from a queue, and we judge progress by what researchers do with the tools rather than by targets. We are moving from asynchronous toward pair programming, short iterations and regular retrospectives.

This role will place you in a central node of a product that is evolving with its researcher user base. We have extensive feedback from internal use as well as two years of user pilots with research labs across North America, more ideas than we can act on, a growing community of labs, and funding to do something with both. You'll shape the product strategy, working out with the founders where Discourse Graphs should go, what to prioritize, and how to get there.

• Consider whether the product stays a set of plugins in Obsidian or needs a standalone app.
• Determine how it will integrate with researchers’ existing tools such as agentic coding interfaces.
• Explore when to extend use cases to adjacent areas like publication overlays and institutional research roadmapping.

Much of the work is hands-on, since there is no product team under you. Week to week you'll talk with the researchers who use the tools, turn what you hear into one ordered queue of work together with the designer and developers, and show your ideas as working prototypes as often as you write them up. You’ll be able to rate priority based on user need and our product vision. Engineers choose their own work from that queue, so we won't ask you to assign tasks, run sprints or act as a Scrum Master.

Qualifications

• Drawn to the problem of how research gets documented, connected and built upon.
• Comfortable synthesizing diverse user needs and feedback into high-level priorities and concrete prototypes.
• Design instinct centers on usability and meeting users within their existing workflows.
• Enjoy putting early-stage ideas in front of people and adapting based on feedback.
• Ability to work alongside designers and engineers rather than handing work to them.
• Experience working without a manager: noticing what needs doing, taking it on, and keeping others posted in writing.

Requirements

• Comfort soliciting and navigating user input in context of documented user flows.
• A habit of talking with users every week, and of showing ideas as prototypes.

Benefits

• Flexible approach to working hours and remote working.
• Astera-sponsored health, vision and dental benefits for employees.
• Onboarding help from peer product teams.

How we hire

• Start with a 30-minute call to get to know each other, with the last ten minutes for your questions.
• Next is a working session of up to 90 minutes with two of us on a real piece of our product work, in place of a take-home task.
• After that, you'll talk with the founders about where you think the product should go.
• Finally, we'll ask for two references, from an engineer and a designer you have worked with.

To apply

Please apply through the form below. Along with your CV, we'll ask for a short note about a time something a user told you changed your product's direction, a description of your previous work in this area, and a link to something that shows how you think about product direction, such as a strategy write-up, a talk, a post or a prototype you built. We'll also ask about your availability, and whether you would prefer employment or a contract. We will start reviewing applications November 2. If you have questions about the role, write to [email protected] .