Product Manager - Core Management Platform

Vantaca is the leading AI-native community management performance platform, enabling teams to work smarter and faster. The Product Manager for the Core Management Platform will focus on making the software easier to use and building capabilities that streamline customer workflows. This role involves customer discovery, API-first thinking, and driving measurable outcomes.

Responsibilities:

• Run discovery with a method that's distinctly yours. Not a generic JTBD template, not a list of feature requests, but a way of getting to ground truth that surfaces what customers can't articulate yet
• Spend real time with management companies on calls, in their workflow, watching how they actually operate, and bring back signal that drives the roadmap
• Take initiative on what to build next without waiting for direction. You should be bringing ideas to the team, not waiting to be assigned them
• Build a clear point of view on what's worth building, what's noise, and why, and defend it with evidence
• Treat ease of use as a measurable outcome (clicks saved, time back to the customer, friction removed, frustration eliminated), not a polish item
• Spot the places customers are working around our software instead of with it, and fix the root cause, not the symptom
• Default to making something a current customer already does feel effortless before building something new
• Remember that for customers who live in our software every day, removing friction is the single highest-leverage thing the product can do, and the single biggest reason they renew, refer, and recommend us
• Partner with design as a peer. UX quality is a non-negotiable bar, not an optimization phase after engineering is done
• Treat API design as a product decision, not a backend concern
• What the API supports today determines what agents, integrations, customer workflows, and surfaces can do tomorrow
• Spec the data model and endpoints with the same rigor you spec the UI. Both are the product, and both shape how easily customers and partners can do what they need
• Partner directly with platform engineering on endpoint design, sequencing, and durability. Push back when something gets solved at the UI layer that should be solved in the API layer (and vice versa)
• Make sure every capability is exposed cleanly to HOAi and IQ so the platform compounds. What you ship for one customer surface should make the rest of Vantaca more powerful, not less
• Treat every feature as a two-sided question: what could the agent take off the customer's plate, and what stays with the customer because it should
• Design human surfaces that are great on their own, and even better when an agent is doing work alongside
• Spec the agent's role with care: autonomous where it has earned trust, supervised where it hasn't, escalated where it should be. Define failure modes as a first-class part of the spec
• Know when not to build an agent. Sometimes the right answer is a UX change that removes the work entirely. Sometimes it is an API that lets the customer's existing tool do the job. Bias toward whatever makes the customer's life easier the fastest
• Define what success looks like before you ship (customer adoption, time saved, friction removed, satisfaction, retention impact), and instrument the feature to prove it
• Internal enablement, customer communications, release notes that people actually read, success stories that move the next deal forward
• Track every feature post-launch and own the metric. If adoption is flat, you find out why and fix it. If a feature isn't making customers happier, you kill it or rebuild it
• Partner with sales, CS, and marketing to make sure the value of what you built shows up in the field. Customers should be calling out the improvements without prompting
• Carry multiple capabilities at different stages at the same time (one in discovery, one in spec, one in build, one in launch) without dropping any of them
• Be excited about change. Priorities shift, customers surface new signal, the platform evolves. You should be energized by that, not destabilized by it
• Use AI spec-driven development as your primary workflow: rapid prototyping, spec generation, working closely with engineering to compress the time from idea to shipped
• Hit decisions quickly with the information you have, and adjust when you learn more
• Make your case to engineering, design, executives, and customers with the same clarity. Direct, fact-based, no hedging
• Bring data to every conversation that needs it, and bring conviction to every conversation that doesn't
• Translate the technical reality of what you're building into language that lands with a customer exec, and translate the customer reality into language that lands with engineering
• Build the trust that lets the team move faster because they know your judgment is sound

Requirements:

• A discovery method that's distinctly yours. You should be able to walk through how you decide what to build and why
• Comfortable getting on the phone with customers, sitting inside their workflow, and coming back with conviction about what matters and what doesn't
• Track record of identifying what to build next without being told, and defending that call with evidence when challenged
• Bias toward building things that do work for customers, not things that give customers more work to do
• Obsesses about ease of use as something you can measure. Counts clicks, counts page loads, counts moments where the customer has to stop and ask 'what was I doing again'
• Track record of shipping software improvements that current customers noticed and called out, not just internal-facing changes
• Understands that for customers using a tool every day, removing friction is the highest-leverage thing the product can do, and the surest path to happier customers
• Partners with design as a peer, not a consumer of design work
• Believes happy customers using software that feels effortless is worth more than shiny features customers don't use
• Treats API design as a product decision, not a backend concern. Understands how services connect, where boundaries belong, and how an API decision today shapes what is possible tomorrow
• Has spec'd or owned APIs that other teams or integrations depend on. Knows what versioning, breaking changes, and durability actually cost
• Can read an OpenAPI spec, push back on data model decisions, and reason about how today's API decisions shape tomorrow's customer experience
• Comfortable making the tradeoff call between a UI fix that ships today and an API fix that takes longer but compounds for every customer surface that comes after
• Experience speccing or building agentic workflows. You understand what a tool call is, how agents chain actions, how to define success at the workflow level, and how failure handling shapes the customer experience
• You can tell when a workflow should be replaced by an agent, and just as importantly, when it shouldn't. Sometimes the answer is a UX fix or an API change, not an agent
• Demonstrated ability to use AI tools (Claude, Claude Code, Cursor, v0, Lovable, etc.) as your primary product workflow. Not just for productivity, but for discovery, prototyping, spec generation, and working closer to the code
• Track record of shipping AI-powered features with real success metrics. Not just launched, but measured against adoption, workflow reliability, or customer outcome
• Has built something on the side (a personal project, an open-source tool, a deployed web service) that demonstrates your AI instincts are genuine, not just professional
• 3+ years in product management, technical product ownership, or a closely adjacent role. We are open to junior candidates with the right instincts over senior candidates without them
• Proven ownership of a product roadmap with measurable customer outcomes attached
• Strong written and verbal communication. Direct, fact-based, able to make a complex platform tradeoff legible to a management company exec and technically credible to an engineer in the same conversation
• Comfort in a high-growth, fast-moving environment where the platform is being built and shipped simultaneously, and where context shifts week to week
• Comfortable carrying multiple workstreams at once without losing fidelity on any of them
• Go-getter by default. Brings ideas, brings opinions, brings the next thing without waiting to be asked
• Obsessed with the customer in a way that shows up in how you talk about them, not just how you write about them
• Obsessed with metrics in a way that means you'd rather kill your own feature than let it ship without proving it made customers happier
• Energized by change, not drained by it
• Builds because they love it, not because the job requires it