Technical Project Manager

Bring order and purpose to our product design and engineering operations.

About the team

Helpful is a well-funded online media startup. Our product team is a small but mighty team of 3 engineers and 1 designer so far and we plan to add 3-4 more to the group this year. This role will report to our Chief Strategy Officer, Aaron Gunderson (LinkedIn profile) with a dotted line to our Engineering Director, Alex Young (LinkedIn profile).

About the job

We"ve got big ambitions and lofty ideas and we"re looking for someone who would relish the opportunity to break these down into bite-size, workable chunks. We"re still in the forming phase, so there"s lots of room to establish cultural rhythms and lightweight processes. Here"s what you"d be working on in your first 90 days and beyond:

• Capturing all product requirements from stakeholders and leading discussions on their acceptance criteria
• Developing a prioritization framework that helps us do the most important work first
• Taking ownership of our Jira instance (or recommending another tool?) so that there is team-wide visibility and shared understanding of tickets
• Establishing sprint structure and leading sprint discussions
• Leading team retrospectives and surfacing ideas for improvement
• Establishing quality programs and standards
• Connect product design and design system tasks seamlessly into engineering workflows
• Help the team articulate constraints and tradeoffs and make informed decisions
• Communicate progress and status to executive stakeholders
• Resolve intra-team conflict and foster meaningful, cross-functional relationships
• Create a Work Breakdown Structure for major projects
• Help evaluate risks and create a roadmap to establish timelines

About you

More than a process or framework advocate, we"re looking for someone who is deeply strategic; someone who takes time to understand technical challenges, develop business acumen and help us build the right thing quickly.

Certificates are nice but we don"t care much for how classically trained you are or where/if you went to school; we"re more interested in demonstrable ability to develop a rapport with a diverse team and create order from chaos. Here are a few traits that we"ll look for:

• Specialized but versatile - we"ll rely on you for your expertise, but we"re a small team and you"ll need to be the type that likes to wear many hats
• Organized but flexible - we"re keen on trying out new and better ways of organizing our work, but please be open to feedback and help us land on a process that empowers rather than burdens
• Curious but collected - you ask smart questions and you"re driven to understand complex dependencies but you don"t waste time miring in hypotheticals
• Servant leadership - you"re unselfish and you work to build trust and encourage diversity of thought; you"re fulfilled when others are growing and doing their best work

Pay and benefits
Though 2 of our engineers are distributed (in MST timezone), this is a full-time gig based out of our office in downtown Salt Lake City, UT. We"ll plan on working at least 4 days in the office and we"ll be experimenting with half-day Fridays between Memorial Day and Labor Day (to get a head start on amazing Utah weekends).

Depending on years of experience and complexity/scope of projects managed, the salary for this position is between $80,000-$115,000, with a 5-10% bonus paid quarterly. All employees are part of our bonus program.

The position includes 4 weeks (20 days) of paid time off, plus 11 additional days for local national holidays and 5 paid volunteer days. Each quarter, we"ll give you $100 to go to your happy place for a day just to think-a personal offsite of sorts. You're also free to take additional time off here and there as needed for any reasonable reason, like if you or your child/pet are sick, you need to run an errand or whatever. Some folks start the day sooner or finish it out later, you can figure out a reasonable schedule that works for you; what matters to us is that you"re accountable and communicative - we"re not fans of tracking hours.

We offer competitive medical (70%), vision (100%) and dental (70%) insurance (through United Healthcare) as well as life insurance, short and long-term disability. After 3 months of employment, you'll be eligible for our 401(k) benefit, which the company matches up to 4% of your salary.

We"ll set you up with great equipment (laptop, stand, monitor, keyboard) to do your best work and we"re thinking a lot about other perks and cultural traditions that make sense.

About the company

This is an incredible time to be one of the first 20 employees at Helpful! We"re young enough that your ideas and voice will carry extra weight and have real impact. You"ll be a key contributor in the formative stages of our culture and strategy.

We"re building a family of digital media brands with the mission of creating confident consumers. We believe when someone receives help, they are then compelled to give it and everything we build supports that belief. Our modern approach meets consumers where they are with timely resources, dynamic tools and meaningful community connections.

Our values

Build on trust - when we start from a place of trust-genuinely aiming to do right by each other-we enable the type of work environment we all want to take part in and everything we do is better as a result.

Expand your mind - we can"t rely on groupthink or lazy data to drive innovation; our meaningful breakthroughs will come from diversity of thought and intellectually honest debate.

Design deliberately - we"re methodic in our design approach so we can shape the future we want, but we balance that with gaining early validation and moving quickly when it matters.

Look for links - a short-term approach to solving problems will ultimately create more of them; our primary differentiation is our ability to connect the dots and build solutions that scale.

Focus on effect - we combine our humanity and sensibility to make smart bets and direct our passion toward productive outcomes; apathy and outrage tend to cause more harm than good.