Hi! We're Forerunner.

We believe that climate adaptation is a necessity, not a luxury, and communities deserve access to powerful software that helps them plan for the future. The challenge of climate change is complex – it implicates how municipalities plan, manage capital, and communicate to both residents and higher levels of government. Forerunner helps local communities do these things better by empowering them to access, understand, and mobilize local-level flood risk data at scale.

The Role

In this role, you’d be responsible for creating and managing the product roadmap of a couple of teams alongside designated engineering and design peers. As Forerunner is primarily a product-driven organization whose requirements often come from our sales and customer success teams, we’re looking for someone who:

• Has 4-8 years of proven experience as a Product Manager.
• Is incredibly familiar with product management processes and does not shy away from instituting these processes where needed, making tweaks to said processes as necessary to accommodate Forerunner’s customers and their related deadlines.
• Talks to customers, digs into their requests, and synthesizes various seemingly disparate asks into a common feature set that satisfies more than just the immediate need. Note that Forerunner’s customers come from all kinds of backgrounds within government, so empathy and willingness to negotiate with customers on their terms is a must.
• Can write well-defined, unambiguous user stories that will provide appropriate guidance to the engineering team.
• As a product sold to governments and available to the general public, we expect our PMs to be able to navigate the nuances of PII / SOC2 / ADA regulations, to name a few. This understanding then reflects in the requirements produced for our more sensitive features.
• Willing to get their hands dirty by QA’ing the work of the engineering team as a way to better understand the product as a whole and thus advocate for our customers if issues are identified with the software.
• Lead product webinars with our customers where we announce new feature releases and answer any questions that might arise. This requires a deep understanding of our product, so we expect our PMs to be able to quickly become subject matter experts on the various features their team is responsible for.
• Extensive experience in consensus building across a variety of different stakeholders, as the climate tech space is fairly nuanced and home to multiple perspectives.

We strongly encourage people from underrepresented groups to apply - the problem of climate change impacts all of us, and we want to reflect that within our team's composition.

What You'll Do

• Manage the backlog of two distinct teams within Forerunner to provide direction and clarity throughout our two-week sprints. This includes leading pre-planning and planning meetings to ensure alignment between the team’s roadmap with that of the larger organization.
• Starting from customer calls and sales / CS requests, you’d devise high-level roadmaps to encompass our quarterly goals. Once these goals are set, you’d define product specs via PRDs, drive execution across engineering and design teams, and work with CS counterparts to communicate releases to customers.
• Take stock of existing Forerunner product and design processes and correct them where they deviate from industry best practices or where they could be substantially improved, always with a focus on velocity and customer alignment.
• Mentor our junior product managers by leading by example and meeting with them on a regular basis to provide feedback on their work.
• Converse with a variety of different customers, as well as our internal sales teams, CS teams, and existing product resources to become a subject matter expert on the various different workflows that Forerunner supports. This will often involve going to flood plain management and other similar conferences, which is a great opportunity to meet the customer face-to-face.

What We Offer

Forerunner is an early stage company with an interdisciplinary team. We are motivated by seemingly intractable problems and work hard to support one another.

We're mission-driven. Our mission orients our business strategy and pushes us to work with a sense of urgency. We’re in the weeds - our entire team spends time engaging with our partners in the field to better understand the real-world problems they face.

We're a small team. As a member of our growing team, you will quickly become an invaluable part of our organization and have a meaningful impact on our business and technical direction. We welcome unique perspectives and backgrounds. Your opinion matters and we hope you'll share it.

We build each other up. A team works best when its members are adequately equipped with the tools to tackle the problems they are facing. Forerunner strives to provide adequate feedback and appropriate learning opportunities to help all its team members expand their skills.

We want you to be happy and healthy. Forerunner offers competitive compensation, health/vision/dental coverage, a 401k plan, and one expensed lunch per week. We also have a quarterly wellness reimbursement so that you can have flexibility in defining what “health” means to you.

The salary range for this position is $160,000-$200,000. This posting may span more than one career level. Compensation is determined based on a variety of factors, including an individual’s skills, experience, qualifications, and working location.