Descript’s vision is to put video in every communicator’s toolkit. Back in the day you needed like six monitors and a bachelor’s degree to edit video. Descript lets you do it by editing a document. In the future, maybe you won’t even need that! But building a new way to record or generate, transcribe, edit and mix spoken audio and video comes with a series of unique design, technology, and business challenges. In other words, we need really good product managers.
As a Staff Product Manager, you’ll be responsible for defining the strategy, building the roadmap and shipping features for one of our product teams. We’re a small, flat team. You’ll work closely with a team of world-class PMs, engineers, designers, researchers and product marketers who are all driven to do the best work of their careers.
What you’ll do
- Develop a deep understanding of our customers, market, and product opportunities
- Drive company-wide strategic initiatives that have meaningful business impact
- Be a highly visible, highly influential strategic leader at the company
- Own and drive the feature roadmap for your team, from idea generation through to execution and analysis
- Collaborate with design, engineering and marketing to ship product features that delight our users and deliver meaningful impact on Descript’s business
Who you are
- You have seen (and shipped) some things: You have 7 or more years of product management experience, preferably with a product of technical complexity with high design craft. You can direct your own to do list. You make a ton of progress between check-ins. You won’t be blocked.
- You start with the customer: Plenty of “AI products” start with the technology and they all suck. You care deeply about understanding customers, and have demonstrated experience in doing customer discovery and defining features that solve real problems.
- You are a fog sculptor: There are aspects to our product and its design that do not have real competitors yet. The product intuition and design conventions have not been decided. We need product managers who are attracted to ambiguous and unsolved problems and can sculpt that ambiguity into strategy and magic.
- You care about craft: Our product is not a hype machine that runs on empty promises and vaporware. We think our product will be successful because people love to use it. That means sweating the details. But without the sweat, because you aren’t stressed out.
- You are funny, creative, maybe kind of weird: Ok, this isn’t a hard requirement but Descript is kind of a quirky place and the people who love it tend to like that about working here. So, just want to drop a hint early on. Also, the sense of humor is important because even though we take our work seriously it’s still just, like, video creation and editing. We aren’t flying rockets into space so let’s all have a good time.
The base salary range for this role is $170,000- $250,000/year. Final offer amounts will carefully consider multiple factors, including prior experience, expertise, and location, and they may vary from the amount above.
Descript is building a simple, intuitive, fully-powered editing tool for video and audio — an editing tool built for the age of AI. We are a team of 150 — with a proven CEO and the backing of some of the world's greatest investors (OpenAI, Andreessen Horowitz, Redpoint Ventures, Spark Capital).
Descript is the special company that's in possession of both product market fit and the raw materials (passionate user community, great product, large market) for growth, but is still early enough that each new employee has a measurable influence on the direction of the company.
Benefits include a generous healthcare package, catered lunches, and flexible vacation time. Our headquarters are located in the Mission District of San Francisco, CA. We're looking to hire people who are local and able to join us at the office when needed. We're flexible, and you're an adult—we don't expect or mandate that you're in the office every day. But we do believe there are valuable and serendipitous moments of discovery and collaboration that come from working together in person.
Descript is an equal opportunity workplace—we are dedicated to equal employment opportunities regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity, or Veteran status. We believe in actively building a team rich in diverse backgrounds, experiences, and opinions to better allow our employees, products, and community to thrive.
What We Do
Descript builds simple and powerful collaborative tools for new media creators. We strive to eliminate the tedious work that often stands between an idea and its expression, so that creators can focus on developing their craft instead of their usage of tools.
Descript is a next generation digital media platform that offers a new "engine" that lets you edit audio by editing text (instead of waveforms).
That means it does transcription (both automated and human-powered, whichever you prefer), but more interestingly, it lets you move the audio around by simply editing the transcript.
If you're new to editing audio, you'll find it far easier - it's basically like using a word processor. If you're experienced, Descript is faster than waveform editing - and more fun.
If you work with voice audio (as opposed to music), Descript is what the future looks like...join us and change the world.
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