Open position: Head of Product & Design

Open position:
Head of Product & Design
The business
Driversnote is a product-centric and profitable SaaS company located in the heart of Copenhagen's tech scene. We proudly help over 2.5 million users across more than 50 countries keep their mileage logbooks. No one enjoys the hassle of mileage documentation. So our goal is to automate and simplify this tedious task, making our customer’s work-life easier while saving them both time and money.

We’re a small, but mighty, very product-oriented team: 8 web & mobile developers, 3 product designers, 1 product manager, ​​1 Data Analyst, 8 in marketing and 10 in operations & support (notice: no one in sales).

At Driversnote, you will enjoy the benefits of working at a company that has a clear product-market fit and is fully owned and operated by the founder team. We're profitable and have quadrupled our ARR over the last three years. Our scale will allow you to operate in a truly data-driven fashion, and our independence ensures that we always align our decisions with the best interests of our customers and employees.

The product
To the majority of our users, Driversnote is first and foremost a free mobile app that they find via an app store and install to get automated mileage tracking. They will often start out with motion-based tracking, become aware of free user limitations and eventually become a paying customer and get an iBeacon for improved trip tracking.

The mobile app is backed by a substantial backend, and at driversnote.com we offer a fully fledged web application with advanced trip management, team management and workflows for teams.

Though our product is oriented towards small businesses, we have a B2C-like relationship with many of our users, but we are gradually moving more and more into traditional B2B space with all that this entails of further product enhancements.

The way we work
We use a product development process known as Shape Up, where a few key people take the role as shapers and define projects that can be designed, implemented and released within 6 weeks, known as cycles. For each 6 week cycle, we form new cross-functional teams with designers, developers, marketing and customer support people on them, and we let the teams focus exclusively on finishing their projects within the cycle. Each 6 week cycle is followed by a 2 week cool-down period, where we fix bugs, execute functional projects, evaluate how we did and plan the next cycle.

We like to say that our unfair advantage is that we care more than our competitors, and our users and customers tend to agree when they review our app, respond to NPS surveys and rate our support. We also care a lot about our employees, and between each cycle the entire company has a Team Health Check together, where we rate and discuss how we work together and thrive in our roles. We have a generous budget set aside for each employee to learn and develop, and we do a lot of fun stuff together.

The opportunity
You’ll be responsible for the future of the product in a company where the product is everything. You’ll be reporting directly to the CEO and be responsible for our 3 product designers and our product manager.

You’ll work closely with the CEO, the CTO and the rest of the product team to refine the product strategy and do hands-on shaping, i.e. preparing pitches for the team to work on every cycle.

As a team, we believe in a collaborative working style with a bias towards rapid prototyping, user testing, and a natural and deep curiosity towards our customers and their needs.

You have the ambition and qualifications to eventually move into a Chief Product & Design Officer role and join our management team. At the same time you understand that we’re a small company where everyone has to do hands-on work every day - not everything can be delegated to your reports.

The role
As our new Head of Product & Design you overall responsibility will be a mix of leadership and product management:

• Leading the product team (40%):
  • Product strategy: Drive our long term product discovery, refine and communicate the product vision, set and follow up on objectives and key results (OKRs).
  • Team management: Taking care of our designers and shapers. Coaching them on how to do effective discovery and product development. Ensuring their ongoing development. Having 1:1’s, performance reviews etc. In general setting them up for success.
  • Process refinement: Working on our systems for continuous discovery, ensuring a steady stream of input for the shaping process and good processes for converting that to ready-to-build pitches that have a positive impact on our customers and our business. Involving everyone in the product team in this process but also our marketing and customer success team.

• Acting as a Product Shaper (60%):
  • Discovery: Identifying, exploring, mapping and prioritizing opportunities (customer needs, pain points and desires). From interviewing customers, gathering input from support, conducting surveys, reading customer feedback, analyzing usage data etc. Whatever it takes to get an overview of the opportunity space and diving deep into selected areas. Visualizing and sharing your insights with the rest of the team for example via JTBD methods.
  • Shaping: Figuring out the best solutions to a given opportunity in collaboration with the rest of the product team. Validating solution ideas, sometimes conducting concept or usability testing to maximize the chance of a successful outcome. You’ll condense your findings and suggestions into a pitch that will go to a betting table every 8 weeks and function as a starting point for our cycle teams.
  • Measuring & learning: Keeping an overview of the impact of our work. While the cycle teams will move on to a new cycle every 8 weeks, you’ll be responsible for making sure we continuously follow up on our projects and experiments. You’ll be keeping track of ongoing experiments, and make sure to conclude and learn from them. You’ll make sure to share the learnings and feed this into the discovery work.

You must:

• Have been building digital products for the last 5+ years. Maybe as a designer, UX’er, product manager, entrepreneur or similar. You’ve had a key role in building products, but also in figuring out what to build (discovery & shaping).
• Have extensive experience diving into user pains and needs, and uncovering demand via qualitative as well as quantitative research; e.g. performing interviews, concept- and usability tests, designing surveys etc.
• Have worked with products used by thousands or millions of users. Optimally based on self-service with a product-led motion. And are used to working with a high amount of user inputs.
• Have experience delivering results through others, either through direct management experience or leading teams in a less formal capacity.

You should:

• Think in terms of outcomes, and don’t care about the amount of features we ship, but only about the impact we have on our customers' lives and the future of our business.
• Have a big curiosity to figure out how things work and why people act as they do. And be able to dig deeper until you really understand something. To see problems, people, situations, etc from many different perspectives, and to identify both opportunities and risks in most things.
• Question your own intuition (as well as others) and be able to split up what’s known and what’s hypotheses.
• Have a data-driven and systematic approach to your work. And be used to manage a large amount of inputs and as well as unknowns.
• Be a good writer. The bulk of our work is written; from the pitches we make and the interfaces we design, to the pull request discussions.
• Be an eager learner. You love reading and easily get inspired e.g. by books you’ve read. And you’re able to quickly accumulate knowledge about e.g. the business, the market, our customers etc.
• Have good collaboration skills and be used to working with developers, designers and product managers. You involve other people in your work and prefer solving problems together.
• Have experience defining hypotheses and designing experiments to test assumptions (we are in the fortunate situation of having enough users and the setup to run A/B tests on many of our product initiatives).

It would be nice if:

• You have experience from working in a start-up or building a product from the ground up.
• Have a portfolio readily available that demonstrates your most successful achievements within product management, design and/or UX research.
• You’re a fan of the Jobs-to-be-Done framework and have experience with performing switch interviews or have worked with Outcome Driven Innovation or similar.
• You are used to working with and analyzing data (we spend a lot of time in BigQuery and Looker Studio).
• You have worked with OKRs and have experience setting meaningful goals and following up on them.

This is not for you if:

• Your last job title was “Product owner” or “Project Manager” and your key competence is stakeholder management and writing user stories based on feature requests gathered from sales.
• You only have experience working on products that are tailored to a few big customers.
• You only have experience working in big corporations where your responsibility was to manage other people's work. We cannot stress enough that this is a hands-on role where less than half of your time will be spent on leadership and management.

What we believe in
Vision & mission: We work to eliminate work-life hassles to let people focus on what matters. Today, that means removing the pain and trivial work of handling mileage, while providing peace of mind that nothing is forgotten and all rules are followed.

Product-led: We focus our work on the end-user and optimise for bottom-up adoption. People's use of our product is what leads to our growth. We sell through our product and as self-service. We invest in customer success instead of outbound sales. Our marketing is focused on people with a need, leading them to the product.

Lean & data-driven: We try to get a deep understanding of the problems we’re solving. But we also acknowledge that we often can’t predict the outcome of our work. So we believe in an experiment-based approach to product development with short build-measure-learn cycles. For this reason, we also don’t believe in detailed plans for more than 3 months ahead.

Long-term & compounding: We invest in things that will have a continuous return and compound. We e.g. prefer a 1% improvement of activation rate over a €100k deal. We’re self-funded, so we don’t stress about the next funding round, and take the time to go into depth with our work.

What we offer
At Driversnote you will be part of an international team composed of talented people that are fun to be around. You will have ample opportunity to influence decisions at all levels, and we hope we can both teach you something and learn something new from you. You’ll get to work with and learn from a team of highly experienced entrepreneurs and tech people. We’ll set aside resources for independent skill development to help you grow and develop your career.

We work in a relaxed environment with new offices near The Meatpacking District. We get a tasty, freshly cooked lunch every day (vegetarian option available), great coffee, cozy Friday drinks, and have great events; from our running club and gaming nights, to our epic Christmas and summer parties.

Since many of us have spouses and kids that we enjoy spending time with, we can honestly say that we offer a healthy work-life balance along with a competitive salary and all the benefits you would expect.

Check out our LinkedIn for pictures and see the team events we host.

How to apply
Email us at [email protected] with the subject “Head of Product & Design”. Tell us why you’re the one for us and show some of your work.

We accept applications until August 5. After this, we expect to take a couple of days to review all applications and get back to you no later than August 12. Expect case work during the interview process. The case will be representative of the kind of work you’ll do with us.

We look forward to hearing from you!