Writing Job Descriptions for Early-Stage Startups

# Head of Product

## About the Company
We're building AI-powered customer support tools that help e-commerce brands resolve tickets faster and keep shoppers happy. Fresh off a $3M seed round, our team of 8 is working with early design partners and seeing strong pull from DTC brands ready to replace legacy helpdesks. We're at the stage where every decision shapes the company.

## About the Role
As our first Head of Product, you'll own what we build and why. In your first 6-12 months, you'll define our product strategy, establish a customer discovery rhythm that informs every sprint, and ship features that take us from early design partners to a repeatable, paid product. Success looks like clear product-market fit signals, a roadmap the team rallies behind, and customers telling their peers about us.

## What You'll Do
- Own the product roadmap end-to-end, from discovery through launch, with direct input from the CEO and engineering lead
- Talk to 5+ customers and prospects every week and turn those conversations into prioritized bets
- Define and track the metrics that tell us whether we're winning—activation, resolution rate, retention
- Ship the next generation of our AI agent capabilities in tight collaboration with engineering, moving from weekly to daily releases
- Build the feedback loops (user research, analytics, support tickets) that keep us close to customer reality as we scale
- Hire and mentor the first product hires behind you—PMs, designers, or a researcher—once we've earned the right to grow the team
- Partner with go-to-market on positioning, pricing, and packaging as we move from design partners to self-serve and sales-led motions

## What We're Looking For
- 6+ years in product, with at least 2 leading product at an early-stage B2B SaaS company (Seed to Series B)
- A track record of shipping products customers actually use and pay for—bonus if you've taken something from 0 to 1
- Comfort with ambiguity: you write the brief, run the interview, open the PR comment, and update the pricing page
- Strong opinions about AI/LLM-powered products, loosely held, with real experience shipping them
- Excellent written communication—you'll set direction largely through docs

## Nice to Have
- Background in customer support, helpdesk, or e-commerce tooling
- Experience working with DTC brands as customers
- Technical background (CS degree, former engineer, or similar)

## Compensation & Benefits
- **Salary:** $160,000–$190,000
- **Equity:** 0.75%–1.5%
- **Remote-first**, US time zones (overlap with Pacific preferred) [assumed based on team location]
- [Assumed] Full health, dental, and vision coverage; $2,000 home office stipend; unlimited PTO with a 3-week minimum

## How to Apply
Email us at [careers@company.com] with a short note on a product you shipped that you're proud of and why. No cover letters needed—just be specific. We respond to every applicant within a week.

# Job Description: Head of Product

## About the Company

We're building the operating system for e-commerce customer support—AI that actually reduces ticket volume instead of just routing them faster. We've raised $3M from top-tier investors and have 8 people shipping real product to paying customers. Our mission: give small and mid-market brands the support infrastructure that only enterprise companies could afford before.

## About the Role

You'll own what we build and why. In your first 6-12 months, you'll have articulated a compelling product roadmap based on direct customer feedback, shipped 2-3 major features that measurably reduce support costs for our users, and established yourself as the customer voice inside the company. Success means our retention rate improves, our feature adoption accelerates, and our sales team has concrete evidence of product-market fit to close larger deals. You'll be equally comfortable writing specs and jumping on customer calls—there's no "that's not my job" here.

## What You'll Do

- **Talk to customers constantly.** You'll spend 5-8 hours weekly on calls with support leaders and e-commerce operators, turning pain points into prioritized features and strategic bets.
- **Own the roadmap end-to-end.** You'll make trade-offs between quick wins and longer-term vision, communicate them clearly to the team, and explain why we're building what we're building.
- **Ship features that stick.** You'll work directly with our engineering and design team to get from concept to live in 2-4 week cycles, measure impact, and iterate based on real usage data.
- **Define success metrics.** You'll establish dashboards that matter—retention, feature adoption, support cost reduction, NPS—and use them to guide decisions.
- **Unblock the business.** As our first product hire, you'll wear adjacent hats: analyzing pricing strategy with the founder, helping close deals, and shaping the company narrative around our solution.
- **Build the product function.** You'll document how we make decisions, set up customer research infrastructure, and define what good product work looks like as we hire the next person.

## What We're Looking For

- **3+ years as a product manager** at a B2B SaaS or similar environment (or equivalent through a founder/operator role)
- **Comfort with ambiguity and speed.** You've shipped products with incomplete information and made decisions without consensus—and learned from both.
- **Customer obsession that's genuine.** You can sit with unhappy users and extract signal from emotion; you actually want to talk to customers, not delegate it.
- **Technical fluency.** You don't need to code, but you understand APIs, data pipelines, and AI limitations well enough to have real conversations with engineers.
- **Ownership mentality.** You see roadmap misses as your responsibility, not the team's fault. You've fought for resources and made difficult cuts.

## Nice to Have

- Experience in customer support, SaaS operations, or AI/ML products
- Startup background or experience in high-growth environments
- Track record of improving retention or reducing churn through product changes
- Background in e-commerce or understanding of support workflows

## Compensation & Benefits

- **Salary:** $160k–$190k [based on experience]
- **Equity:** 0.75–1.5% [refresher grants planned at future funding rounds]
- **Remote-first:** US time zones required for customer meetings and team sync
- **Practical benefits:** Health/dental/vision, laptop stipend, annual learning budget, unlimited PTO (we actually use it)

We're not a perks company; we're a product company. Compensation reflects early-stage constraints but will reset as we grow.

## How to Apply

Send a brief email to [hiring contact] with:
- Your resume
- One paragraph on why this problem excites you
- A link to a product you've shaped (or a decision you made) you're proud of

We review applications rolling and move fast for strong fits.

## About the Company  
We're building AI-powered customer support tools that help e-commerce brands resolve issues faster, reduce support costs, and create better customer experiences at scale. We're a seed-stage B2B SaaS startup, 8 people today, and we recently raised $3M to accelerate product development and go-to-market. We already have early customer traction and now need a product leader who can help turn strong signals into a durable, category-defining company.

## About the Role  
As our first Head of Product, you'll own the product roadmap from insight to launch. You'll work directly with founders, engineers, and customers to decide what to build, why it matters, and how to ship it quickly without losing focus.

Success in your first 6-12 months will look like this: you'll establish a clear product strategy tied to customer pain points and company goals, create a tight feedback loop with users, and help the team ship high-impact features faster and with more confidence. You'll bring structure where it's needed, but stay hands-on and pragmatic in a fast-moving seed-stage environment.

## What You'll Do  
- Turn customer pain points and market signals into a focused roadmap that drives retention, expansion, and product differentiation.  
- Build a repeatable customer feedback process so product decisions are grounded in real usage, not assumptions.  
- Partner closely with engineering and design to ship meaningful improvements and new capabilities at startup speed.  
- Define the metrics that matter and use them to prioritize, learn, and adjust quickly.  
- Create clarity across the company on what we're building, why it matters, and what success looks like.  
- Help shape our AI product strategy, balancing user value, technical feasibility, and commercial impact.  
- Lay the foundation for how product is run as the company scales, while still doing the hands-on work yourself.

## What We're Looking For  
- You've led product at an early-stage startup or been a senior product leader in a fast-growing SaaS company with clear ownership.  
- You know how to go from zero to one: finding signal in ambiguity, making decisions with imperfect information, and iterating quickly.  
- You're highly customer-oriented and comfortable talking to users frequently—ideally daily.  
- You can balance strategy and execution; you don't just define priorities, you drive them through launch and learning.  
- You communicate clearly, make tradeoffs explicit, and build trust across technical and non-technical teams.  
- You care about building products that solve real business problems for customers.

## Nice to Have  
- Experience in e-commerce, customer support, or workflow software.  
- Experience building AI/LLM-powered products.  
- Familiarity with analytics, experimentation, and usage-based product decision-making.  
- Prior experience as the first product hire or first senior product leader.

## Compensation & Benefits  
- Salary: $160,000-$190,000 base [assumption based on stated budget]  
- Equity: 0.75%-1.5% [assumption based on stated range]  
- Remote-first within US time zones  
- Early-stage ownership, direct founder partnership, and significant influence on company direction

## How to Apply  
Send us your resume or LinkedIn, plus a short note on why this role fits your experience. If you've been the person figuring out what to build in messy, fast-moving environments, we'd love to hear from you.

### About the Company
We're a seed-stage B2B SaaS startup building AI-powered customer support tools that help e-commerce brands resolve tickets 5x faster and scale without hiring armies of agents. With 8 people and a fresh $3M seed round, we're moving from prototype to first paying customers. You'll join at the ground floor, shaping a product that directly impacts brands like Shopify merchants handling millions in orders.

### About the Role
In your first 6-12 months as our first Head of Product, you'll define the initial roadmap, ship an MVP that lands 10+ beta customers, and establish weekly customer feedback loops to hit product-market fit. Success means owning end-to-end product decisions—from discovery to launch—while collaborating with engineering to iterate weekly, turning ambiguity into a validated product serving real revenue.

### What You'll Do
- Launch a core AI support feature that reduces customer ticket resolution time by 50% for early users.
- Build and refine a product roadmap based on 50+ customer interviews, prioritizing features that drive retention.
- Ship 3-5 major iterations in the first quarter, using data to validate assumptions and cut underperformers.
- Create self-serve onboarding flows that convert 30% of trial users to paid without sales handholding.
- Partner with founders to align product vision with go-to-market, informing pricing and sales collateral.
- Establish metrics dashboards tracking key outcomes like activation rate and churn, guiding all future builds.
- Mentor the team on customer-centric thinking, embedding it into our remote-first culture.

### What We're Looking For
You've led product at a seed or Series A SaaS startup, owning roadmap and shipping from zero to revenue. You talk to customers daily, synthesize their pain into features, and move fast in ambiguous environments—wearing engineering, design, and go-to-market hats as needed. You're hands-on with tools like Figma, Notion, or Amplitude, thrive on ownership, and have 5+ years in B2B product roles, ideally e-commerce or AI.

### Nice to Have
Experience with AI/ML products, customer support workflows, or e-commerce integrations (e.g., Shopify, Zendesk). Prior exits or scaling to $1M ARR.

### Compensation & Benefits
$160k-$190k base salary (US time zones, remote-first with occasional offsites), 0.75-1.5% equity (vesting over 4 years), unlimited PTO, and full health coverage. We prioritize impact over perks—your equity could be life-changing as we grow to $10M ARR.

### How to Apply
Email your resume, a link to your portfolio or a product you've shipped, and 200 words on why you're excited to build our first product at resume@aicustomersupport.com. No agencies.

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