Director of Product Management, Cockroach Labs
$270-358.2k
Distributed SQL for always-on customer experiences
Be an early applicant
Distributed SQL for always-on customer experiences
501-1000 employees
Be an early applicant
$270-358.2k
501-1000 employees
Company mission
To simplify how businesses build and operate world-changing applications.
Role
Who you are
- This leader brings deep customer obsession, strategic clarity, and a relentless drive to improve user outcomes at every stage of the developer lifecycle — from onboarding and activation through scale, observability, and governance
- They operate with an AI-first mindset, using intelligence as a force multiplier for both the product they build and the craft of product management itself
- We seek someone who leads with evidence, listens with empathy, and creates the kind of clarity that lets teams move fast with purpose
- 8-12+ years of experience in Product Management, with 3-5+ years in leadership roles managing PMs
- Proven experience in database, infrastructure, developer tools, cloud infrastructure, or distributed systems products
- A track record of elevating PM craft and team output — not just managing headcount
- Deep fluency in user journey thinking — owning end-to-end experiences across multiple surfaces (UI, CLI/API, Docs)
- Strong evidence-based decision-making: you use telemetry, NPS, RICE, and customer research — not instinct alone
- Excellent written communication — our strategic product meetings rely on written docs, not slides
- Demonstrated ability to drive cross-functional alignment through influence, data, and clarity
- An AI-first mindset: in how you think about product experiences and how you operate day-to-day
- Experience working in a SaaS, enterprise software, or open-core business model preferred
- The
What the job involves
- The Director of Product Management at Cockroach Labs is a senior product leader who owns end-to-end user journeys across Cockroach Labs’ Products. This is a player-coach role: hands-on enough to set the standard for great PM craft, and senior enough to build and develop a high-performing team of Product Managers
- Own the product strategy and portfolio of investments across your journeys, making explicit tradeoffs across user segments, product surfaces, and time horizons, while balancing investments across different deployment options
- The picture of success for your area: a North Star metric plus leading and lagging indicators that reflect real user progress, not feature output
- A team of Product Managers (Staff PMs and/or Senior PMs) — their development, accountability, and craft
- Deep customer and journey discovery: qualitative and quantitative, continuous and structured
- Clear, concise Outcome Briefs (3 pages or less) anchored in WHAT, WHY, and WHO — not feature specs
- A living (now/next/later) roadmap that reflects reality, tradeoffs, and strategic focus
- The PM operating rhythm for your area: weekly triads, biweekly roadmap syncs, monthly insights reviews, and quarterly planning and reflection
- Define a clear product vision for your journeys that connects user problems to business outcomes, and translate it into a 12-month strategy and 90-day outcome bets
- Drive evidence-based prioritization using frameworks like RICE and customer signals — making tradeoffs explicit, not implicit
- Balance short-term fixes with long-term bets, ensuring the team is always working on the highest-leverage problems
- Partner with Engineering on feasibility and tradeoffs — owning the WHAT and WHY; Engineering owns the HOW
- Establish an ongoing rhythm of customer engagement: calls, support ticket review, field shadowing, and journey shadowing sessions
- Define Jobs-To-Be-Done (JTBD) and user personas across your journeys — developers, DBAs, SREs, platform engineers, AI engineers
- Use AI to synthesize qualitative feedback, support tickets, and telemetry at scale — surfacing patterns, not just data points
- Maintain a product backlog grounded in validated, quantified pain points
- Mentor and develop PM talent — elevating the consistency of craft, accountability, and outcomes across your team
- Foster a culture of curiosity, continuous learning, and customer-first thinking
- Set the bar for what great PM work looks like: Outcome Briefs that become models of clarity, roadmaps others want to follow, and insights that shape company decisions
- Drive alignment across Engineering, Design, Docs, Field, and GTM — building shared context, not just shared calendars
- Partner with PMM and GTM to craft compelling launch narratives and post-launch success stories
- Influence through data, clarity, and narrative — not title or escalation
- Identify opportunities to embed AI across user journeys — from schema design to observability to operational intelligence
- Define AI Evals and measurable AI metrics for every AI-powered feature from day one
- Embed AI tools in your team's day-to-day workflows: discovery, spec writing, synthesis, and roadmap planning
- First 30 Days
- Deeply understand our user journeys, the Developer Lifecycle framework, and the product areas you'll own
- Meet your direct reports, Engineering partners, and cross-functional stakeholders across Field, Support, Design, and GTM
- Participate fully in the PM operating rhythm — triads, journey reviews, and prototype reviews
- Get grounded in the current roadmap, active bets, and near-term priorities
- First 90 Days
- Fully own your user journeys — running rituals, driving prioritization, and setting clear success criteria
- Deliver your first Outcome Briefs, Journey Maps, and an updated now/next/later roadmap
- Develop an informed hypothesis on the highest-impact investments for your area and socialize it with your manager and key partners
- Identify and close gaps in customer discovery, telemetry visibility, or cross-functional alignment
- Establish a clear development cadence with your team — 1:1s, growth conversations, and shared expectations
- Reporting to Igor Stanko, VP of Product, you will lead the Product Management team and serve as a key member of the R&D leadership group
Our take
Cockroach Labs was founded by a team of ex-Google employees who wanted to build a database management system similar to Google’s Spanner. The result is CockroachDB, an open-source, distributed SQL database that delivers familiar SQL, strong consistency, and near-indestructible fault tolerance. Designed to scale locally or globally and deployed on any cloud or on-prem setup, it keeps mission-critical applications running even through hardware failures or full data-center outages.
A major milestone in the company's growth is its partnership with IBM ,which integrates CockroachBD into IBM's hybrid infrastructure. This makes it far easier for long-standing mainframe users to modernize without rewriting massive amounts of code. Running CockroachDB on systems like LinuxONE, Linux on Z, Power Systems, and Red Hat OpenShift helps organizations adopt cloud-native architectures while staying in environments they trust. At the same time, enterprise demand is surging and the company is boasting significant year-on-year growth in new customers, ARR, and cloud adoption.
As applications become more global, always-on, and increasingly AI-driven, businesses need databases built for scale, resilience, and zero downtime. And CockroachDB was engienered for exaclt ythat. With a decade of innovation, expanding enterprise traction, and a leadership team experienced in scaling high-growth tech companies, Cockroach Labs is set to power the next generation of mission-critical applications.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
11% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 7 rounds)
Dec 2021
$278m
SERIES F
Jan 2021
$160m
SERIES E
Total funding: $633.2m
Company benefits
- Competitive Health Insurance Coverage
- Paid Parental Leave
- Flexible PTO
- Learning & Development
- Relocation Support
- Employee Referral Bonus
Company HQ
Chelsea, New York, NY
Leadership
Spencer Kimball
(Co-Founder & CEO)Worked at WeGo Systems as CTO for 3 years before joining Google as a Software Engineer for almost 10 years. Also, previous CTO of Viewfinder and Engineer at Square.
Peter Matiss
(Co-Founder & CTO)Previously a Software Engineer at Square, Co-Founder at Viewfinder and a Software Engineer at Google.
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