Product Manager, Voting Information Project

Location: Brooklyn, NY or remote within the US

Salary Range: Salary range is $68,000-100,000 per year. (Offers will vary based on experience and location-based cost-of-living calculations. Brooklyn-specific salary range is $80K–$100K.)

Benefits: Vision, dental, & medical insurance; 403(b) retirement savings plan; generous vacation policy; parental leave; long-term disability; employee assistance program

Level: Mid-level to Senior

Organizational overview

At Democracy Works, we believe voting should fit the way we live. To that end, we build technology for both voters and election administrators that simplifies the process and ensures that no voter should ever have to miss an election.

TurboVote, our first service, helps voters register, stay registered, and cast a ballot in every election, from municipal to national. TurboVote signed up its six millionth voter in 2018 by building the largest college, nonprofit, and corporate voter engagement coalition in the country, including more than 300 campuses, companies like Starbucks, Univision, Facebook, Google, Snap, and dozens more. We also helped (basically) everyone find their polling place through the Voting Information Project. Its data had 123 million impressions in 2016, and over 11 million voters looked up where to vote on GetToThePolls.com. Ballot Scout helps election administrators track absentee ballots through the mail, providing transparency in the vote-by-mail process and making it easier to follow up when things go awry. And in 2018, we became the organizational home of the National Association of State Election Directors (NASED).

As a Product Manager on the Election Administration team, you’ll be working from end-to-end to manage the development of The Voting Information Project – from roadmapping high-level product strategy down into the details of planning sprints and coordinating partner support. While you will be the first dedicated Product Manager for VIP, you’ll be supported by a team of software developers, including a team of data engineers; VIP’s program and partnerships manager; and a Senior Product owner and Engineering Manager supporting the entire Election Administration team.

You will:

• Lead the ideation, development, testing/QA, and launch of new features to make these tools best-in-class software for election administration
• Synthesize user interviews, partner feedback, and staff insights into clear roadmaps for future growth, and into the user stories to see them built
• Pair with a lead developer to define implementation for new features, ensure clear conditions of acceptance (including unsexy stuff like internationalization, accessibility, scaling, security, and browser compatibility), and take part in regular sprint-planning meetings with the developer team to prioritize their work
• Manage a roadmap and vision for VIP’s family tools, owning prioritization and strategy in service of the Voting Information Project’s goals.

You are:

• Empathetic and comfortable acting as users’ biggest advocate
• Attentive to detail and fluent at managing the minutiae
• Able to see the big picture and maintain strategic focus
• Constantly communicating the information your team needs to do their best work
• Able to clearly communicate your vision to both technical and non-technical audiences
• A fantastic listener
• A creative decision-maker who isn’t afraid to make hard calls regarding ideation and feature set
• At ease working solo and as part of a team
• Able to be productive working remotely with a team scattered across the city and/or country.

You have experience:

• Creating and managing a roadmap for a product or large feature
• Drafting robust product and feature requirements, whether solo or in collaboration with a technical team
• Communicating across different areas of expertise and coordinating teams with diverse viewpoints
• Conducting user interviews/direct product research and distilling insights
• Working with UX and Design (and recognizing when their expertise is needed)
• Representing a product or project to clients or other external stakeholders
• Developing strategic plans

Physical demands

This position requires regular, daily use of a computer to conduct work and communicate with colleagues.

Social expectations

Democracy Works’s regular operating hours are 10 a.m. – 6 p.m. Eastern time, and all employees are expected to be available and working during regular operating hours, whether or not they are physically located in New York and/or working out of the Brooklyn office.

Travel expectations

Two times per year, all full-time staff members participate in a five day retreat in our Brooklyn offices. All staff is held each year in May and November. There may be occasional travel to liaise with our partners or attend conferences to represent Democracy Works and/or for personal development.

Application Instructions

To apply, please send a resume and respond to the following questions (in lieu of a cover letter) using the form below.

In your cover letter, please include only the following information:

• How did you find this job listing?
• In one sentence, what makes you interested in Democracy Works?
• In one sentence, what makes you interested in this role?
• Would you be available to start by 11/25/19?
• Are you willing to work at a non-partisan organization?
• In one sentence, what is one product or significant feature that you have managed/owned as a part of a team (either officially or unofficially)?
• Are you familiar with the software development lifecycle?

As part of our application, you’ll see an optional form used to collect EEOC demographic information. The data collected in this form is useful in our EEOC reporting and in our assessment of our recruitment practices. However, please keep in mind that the standardized EEOC language used in this form does not reflect the values of Democracy Works–for example, we don’t view gender as binary. We also encourage all applicants to state their pronouns when applying for any job opening at Democracy Works.

Democracy Works is committed to diversity and inclusion in everything we do and aspires to have a team that’s representative of the voters we serve. When hiring, we practice proactive outreach to top talent that’s underrepresented in our sector. We conduct an anonymized skills evaluation, to reduce implicit bias and resume-dependency in our process. We’re a woman- and gay-founded nonprofit, and promote an inclusive culture that stands against racism, sexism, homophobia, and ableism (to name a few). To be explicit, we strongly encourage applicants of all races, ethnicities, political party associations, religions (or lack thereof), national origins, sexual orientations, genders, sexes, ages, abilities, and branches of military service.

Feel free to contact [email protected] if you have any questions about our commitment to inclusion or about general hiring practices, or if you need an accommodation for a medical condition during the hiring process. Democracy Works posts all current career opportunities at democracy.works/careers.