About the Role
Community.co is looking for a technically fluent product leader to own the strategy, execution, and quality of our platform. Community.co has pioneered the business of community for over a decade. We build, acquire and manage professional communities of all shapes and sizes. To date, we’ve represented 50+ communities and 44K+ members, powered by our team of 200 people worldwide. We help business leaders publish thought leadership articles on premier outlets such as Forbes.com, host virtual events, and connect busy professionals to resources and peers.
Our platform is a multi-tenant system built on Next.js, Convex, Postgres, Fastly, and related technologies, powering multiple brands, each with its own configurations and member-facing experiences. The product organization is entering a new phase: we are adopting AI-powered workflows to accelerate how features are scoped, planned, and delivered. This role is the bridge between business stakeholders and engineering execution. You will own the product roadmap, act as the gatekeeper for all engineering resources (both internal and external), manage two product owners, and ensure the team ships the right things at the right quality.
This is not a project management role, and it is not a hands-on programming role. Direct experience in a software engineering role is a must, but you will not be writing code day to day. You are expected to be a steward of the engineering team. We need someone who can evaluate a technical spec, assess whether a feature brief is complete, understand the implications of a proposed change across a shared platform, and hold engineering accountable. You need to understand how software gets built well enough to know when it’s not being built well.
What You’ll Do
Steward the product roadmap. Work with business leadership to prioritize and sequence what gets built, and define how it gets built — scope, sequencing, and readiness. Balance internal capabilities with member-facing features that drive retention, community growth, and new business development. Translate business objectives into clear execution direction. Make tradeoff decisions with conviction.
Own how engineering capacity is used. Serve as the primary stakeholder for internal engineering staff and external engineering partners, and the default path for new product and feature work — review briefs, approve scopes, and evaluate delivered output. The goal is structure, not bureaucracy: mission-critical infrastructure work, urgent fixes, and natural overlap with adjacent technical teams (BI, data, ops) can and should keep moving without going through a formal gate. Your job is to make sure those exceptions stay exceptions, and that roadmap and feature work runs through a consistent, accountable process.
Operate our AI-powered product workflows. We’re in the early stages of adopting AI to compress the time between a feature request and an engineering-ready spec — brief generation, impact analysis, async review, and spec QA. The strategic direction for these workflows comes from executive leadership and our external engineering partners; your job is to execute against that direction and make it work on the ground. That means actively using the AI tools in your own day-to-day, holding internal engineers to the AI-powered processes as they roll out, owning the quality of the output (briefs are accurate, the right questions get surfaced, async review replaces unnecessary meetings), and feeding operational learnings back up so the strategy can keep improving. This is an execution role on the AI side, not a role that sets the AI roadmap.
Own the full intake surface — not just new features. Bugs, system updates, maintenance, and support escalations all compete for the same engineering hours as roadmap work. You triage across all of it, decide what gets prioritized, and make sure day-to-day operational load doesn’t crowd out strategic work (or vice versa).
Challenge requirements that don’t make sense. We have structural project management processes that keep the business on track, and those matter. But not every feature request should be taken at face value, and not every request should follow the same path. You are expected to push back on requirements that are vague, redundant, or unnecessarily complex. Look for the more efficient solution. Identify when the standard process should be followed and when breaking the mold gets something done more effectively. The goal is outcomes, not compliance for its own sake.
Drive async-first communication. Feature intake, review, and approval should happen in writing by default. You model this behavior and hold others to it. Live calls are a tool for resolving genuine ambiguity, not the default mode of working. You enforce that discipline across product and engineering.
Lead and develop the product team. Manage a small team of product owners responsible for day-to-day stakeholder coordination, feature intake, and acceptance testing. Set clear expectations, build capability: including the technical fluency to read and write code well enough to unblock engineers and validate output (not to work as engineers), and create the structure that lets the team grow alongside the business
Maintain product and system context. Own the documentation that describes how the platform works: architecture context, brand configurations, feature domains, and known constraints. This documentation powers the AI workflows and serves as the institutional memory of the product organization. Keeping it accurate and current is part of the job, not a side project.
Report on product health. Give senior leadership clear, regular visibility into what’s shipping, what’s blocked, and where the product is headed. Track delivery velocity and the balance between admin and member-facing output. Identify where things are falling behind and propose corrections before they’re asked for.
What You Bring
Experience: 6-8+ years in product management, with at least 3 years in a senior or leadership role. You have worked directly with engineering teams building platform or multi-tenant products. You have shipped software, not just managed backlogs.
Technical fluency: You can read and evaluate a technical specification. You understand APIs, databases, data models, and system architecture at a conceptual level. Familiarity with modern web stacks (Next.js, serverless, relational databases) is a plus. Direct experience in a software engineering role earlier in your career is required. You don’t need to be current on a modern stack, but you’ve written production code at some point and can reason about engineering tradeoffs from firsthand experience.
You can look at an engineering proposal and identify what’s missing, what’s risky, and what questions haven’t been asked. You’ve worked in environments where you were expected to engage with engineering on technical substance, not just priorities.
AI adoption mindset: You have used or are actively learning to use AI tools in your product workflow. You understand the potential of AI-assisted planning, spec generation, and impact analysis, and you’re motivated to push these workflows further. You don’t view AI as a novelty. You view it as a core part of how modern product teams should operate.
Strong written communication: You default to async. You make decisions, give feedback, and resolve ambiguity in writing. You’ve operated in distributed or remote-first environments where written clarity determines whether things ship on time or spin in circles.
Ownership: You take accountability for product outcomes, not just process. When something ships late or ships wrong, you look at your own decisions first. You don’t wait for someone to tell you what to improve.
Stakeholder management: You can manage competing priorities across business teams without defaulting to “let’s get everyone on a call.” You translate business needs into product requirements and engineering constraints into business language. You say no when it’s the right answer and explain why.
Distributed team leadership: You’ve led teams that blend full-time employees and contractors across multiple timezones, geographies, and cultures. You’re not looking for a co-located W-2 team, and you’re not motivated by team-building in the traditional sense.
Bonus points for:
- Prior experience as a software engineer, even if early in your career
- Experience working with external or outsourced engineering teams
- Background in membership, community, or subscription-based platforms
- Experience with HubSpot, Intercom, or Pendo as a product stakeholder
- Experience managing a product budget or evaluating build-vs-buy decisions
- Experience with cloud-native architecture
- Comfort operating in a small, resource-constrained product organization where you wear multiple hats
What Success Looks Like in Year One
- The ratio of member-facing to admin-only features shipped per quarter has measurably improved
- Product documentation is comprehensive, actively maintained, and powering increasingly effective AI workflows
- The two product owners are operating with clear ownership and growing in capability
- Engineering velocity is measurably higher than the prior year
- Product roadmap can be clearly communicated to Engineers, Directors, Executives
Additional Benefits
- A growing team with opportunities to develop with a thriving company
- Use new technology and solve interesting problems
- 100% remote, work where you want
- 401K with up to 4% company match
- Generous paid time off + all major US holidays
- Medical, dental, vision coverage
- Technology reimbursement program
To apply for this position, please submit your resume and a brief summary of qualifications to [email protected]