Director of Product, The Athletic
Platforms
$165-195k
Subscription based publisher of sports content
Be an early applicant
Subscription based publisher of sports content
501-1000 employees
Be an early applicant
$165-195k
501-1000 employees
Company mission
To produce smarter coverage for die-hard fans and redefine the way fans get access to sports content by flipping the normal model for sports journalism.
Role
Who you are
- 4+ years of highly relevant product leadership experience including a team or functional leadership role
- Clear strategic strengths, from goal setting to strategy development to communication and reporting
- Expertise in consumer digital products
- Technical expertise to partner closely with Engineering on technical decisions
- Executional capabilities including cross-functional initiative leadership - you need to get things done in addition to guide the work
- Demonstrated experience being a people manager your team learns from and is excited to work with
- High familiarity with and love for sports and journalism
- Excellence with data - analyzing data, deriving insights, and making data-driven decisions
- User-centric mentality
- Eagerness to try new things and learn - and a willingness to fail
What the job involves
- Product plays a pivotal role at The Athletic, spearheading critical cross-functional initiatives and leading teams of engineers, designers, marketers, and analysts to execute seamlessly on behalf of the business and our users
- As a Director of Product, you will be a key strategic and operational leader, partnering closely with company executives and leading one or more Product Managers
- This is an advanced role, and you will be critical to the success of the Product organization and company at large
- You will report to the VP of Product
- Own the strategy and roadmap for 1 or more product areas:
- Define the strategy and vision for your product area(s) to meet business objectives
- Leverage existing expertise in your domain area(s) (e.g., Platform and Technical Product) and a clear understanding of user and technical needs
- Partner closely on strategy and execution with tech executives across product, design, engineering, data, marketing, and the newsroom
- Own a multi-team roadmap that balances long term and short term considerations
- Drive impact:
- Lead large cross-functional working group(s) on key strategic initiatives
- Work closely with the rest of the Product team to align initiatives and dependencies
- Report on impact and learnings to key executive stakeholders
- Lead a team of 1 or more Product Managers:
- Develop the careers of your direct report Product Managers
- Foster a highly collaborative and productive environment
- Inform the work of other teams through direct and indirect mechanisms, including mentoring other PM colleagues as appropriate
- Improve organizational operations:
- Work closely with other tech leaders on operational improvements
- Invest smartly in platforms and processes to ship and experiment at scale
- Your primary focus is to own the Product Platforms strategy (web, iOS, Android), and in turn to contribute to the Engineering / Technical Platforms strategy
- Consumer - Web, iOS, Android
- Internal - CMS, A/B testing, Push and Delivery Pipeline
- Our Platforms strategy must enable all tech teams at The Athletic to deliver business and user impact efficiently and effectively; you are serving the business directly and by enabling internal teams
- Key areas include page performance, technical SEO, experimentation, and delivery
- To succeed you will need to provide thoughtful leadership on strategy, systems, and processes; specific ownership areas include:
- Strategic: owning the Product Platform strategy and contributing to Technical strategy
- Initiative-based: owning key cross-functional platform-related initiatives, including those that are large strategic priorities led by Platform teams, and important ones supported by the Platform teams
- Organizational: assessing the needs for, and building, a team of 1 or more PMs to drive product roadmaps and project execution across Platform teams
- Operational: ensuring that consumer-facing Product Managers and Eng Teams are connected into the Platforms strategies and roadmaps, and capacity is allocated to product teams’ needs are prioritized
- Provide transparency to the impact and effectiveness of our Platform teams through metrics such as change fail rate, lead time, deployment frequency, mean time to recovery, and other metrics that offer insights into productivity and quality
- In addition to reporting to the VP of Product for The Athletic, you will also partner closely with:
- Our VP of Engineering and Engineering Director of Platforms, on The Athletic’s Platform strategy
- The New York Times’ Platform Team leadership, to advocate for The Athletic’s platform needs, and to evaluate the potential impact of integrating within existing NYT platforms
Our take
The Athletic provides authentic, in-depth coverage written by journalists who know the teams they write about inside out. Its model bucks the trend of traditional sports journalism outfits by asking for a subscription rather than relying on ad-revenue.
Despite initial doubts that users would be willing to pay for sports journalistic content, the Athletic has found significant success and was acquired by the New York times in 2022.
This collaboration was criticised at the time by investors who believed that the Athletic was undersold. However, despite The Athletic operating at a loss since the takeover, it's clear that the New York Times perceives the subscription magazine as a long-term investment, predicting that it will be operating at a profit within the next 4 years. This will be aided by accelerated customer growth and the growing trend of subscription-based sports news.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Company
Funding (last 2 of 6 rounds)
Jan 2020
$50m
SERIES D
May 2019
$21.8m
SERIES C
Total funding: $139.5m
Company HQ
Financial District, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Adam Hansmann
(President & Co-Founder)Previously a McKinsey Business Analyst and then Associate at Calera Capital.
Alex Mather
(CEO & Co-Founder)Vice President at startup building a community for athletes called Strava before founding The Athletic
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