LaunchPad Lab is looking to hire our first Product Manager to help build out our Product Team. Our team is focused on running 3-6 week Product Discovery workshops with our clients.

The perfect match

You call yourself a problem-solver. A dot-connector. A multi-hat-wearer.

You feel comfortable with white-space, a blank slate, or an empty canvas.

You understand that the unpaved road ahead that we call Product Management is hard. Really hard. You must navigate roadblocks called constraints, assumptions, competition, and tradeoffs. But you love it.

You have an unquenchable thirst to get to the bottom of problems. You find joy in the challenge of figuring out what the right question is to ask. It's almost annoying how many times you ask why or how deeply you investigate the how of something. But you understand and believe that a problem well-defined is a problem half-solved.

You balance that thirst for understanding the problem with an understanding of user-centered design to help create usable and useful solutions. You are familiar with web technologies like Ruby on Rails, APIs, and Databases to understand the basics of actually building the product. And you may have even tried to bring your own product or app to market previously and have the battle scars of entrepreneurship to prove it. Scars that inform the lessons of customer acquisition, marketing, and business. Your balance gives you the empathy required to communicate clearly with all the stakeholders of a business and product.

You believe that our success is 100% dependent on our client's success and that it's our job to help our clients build the right thing.

About LaunchPad Lab

Fueled by a team of passionate and driven entrepreneurs, LaunchPad Lab is a Chicago-based Development Studio that focuses on growing businesses. We are intentionally small, skilled and focused on our clients' success. We work in a collaborative environment where everyone is expected to be creative and contribute to all facets of building businesses. Each day at LaunchPad Lab is an opportunity to work with a very talented team focused on making a difference.

On a day-to-day basis you feel comfortable:

• Running Product Discovery workshops with clients ranging from startups who have new product ideas, to Fortune 500 companies looking to enhance and automate current processes.
• Performing customer, user and stakeholder interviews.
• Synthesizing research to understand unmet user needs and prototyping solutions to meet those needs
• Working with UX/UI Designers to create mockups of solutions
• Working with Engineering team to create product specs and requirements
• Formulating and communicating design and development recommendations to clients through materials such as roadmaps, canvases, job stories, and annotated wireframes
• Contributing to the growth of the Product Team at LaunchPad by creating and documenting best practices

You also feel comfortable and at home when you have to:

• Run a meeting on your own
• Explain a difficult concept to a group of non-technical stakeholders
• Say no to an idea because you believe it's in the client's best interest
• Figure out how to create something from nothing
• Adjust the content and style of your communication depending on the stakeholder

• Competitive salary
• Health/Dental insurance plan
• 401(k)
• $1,000 annual conference budget
• New computer purchase and replacement plan
• Flexible vacation policy

Thank you for taking the time to read this job description. It means a lot to us that you are interested in LaunchPad Lab and we looking forward to hearing from you and learning more about you.