Project Manager

Tease the project out of the client’s head and help make it real.

The Project Manager is a liaison between the client and our development team.

We might also call this job “Product Success Advocate”. A large part of your role is to help make our clients and our projects successful. That means helping the client to articulate deeply held ideas and beliefs about how the product should work, and distill those ideas down into action items for the team. You’ll manage our development team to build the product that clients have in mind.

In a very real way, you’ll become part of our clients’ team. They should feel like you deeply understand their problem and the solution, and that you actually are on their team, building their product.

A web development background is helpful, though not absolutely necessary. Though you won’t be writing code, you should be able to check out the codebase, get it running on your local development environment, and review code commits.

You must be able to read and understand technical and API documentation, and translate this to technical requirements meant for our team. You must be able to write clear and concise specifications that are detailed enough to provide developers with actionable tasks, but readable enough to be understood by a normal human.

The ability to think and act on multiple projects simultaneously is crucial. Most of the time you’ll be working on 2-3 projects at once, each with a dedicated developer.

What does a typical day look like?

Every day you’ll need to pull down the latest codebase and check it out. You’re inspecting the dev team’s work and making sure that the project is progressing according to schedule. You’ll also need to:

• Communicate regularly with clients to understand the problem, solution, and product.
• Regularly update the client on progress, new features, and bugfixes.
• Communicate daily with developers.
• Create detailed Statements of Work (SoWs) based on client requirements.
• Translate SoWs into actionable tasks for the development team.
• Work with designers to create sketches or wireframe diagrams to illustrate ideas.
• Spend time using the app to make sure that usability and quality are up to our standards.
• Identify bugs or usability issues, and then create tasks with documentation and screenshots so that they can be addressed.

A typical development cycle is broken up into several two-week sprints. You’ll need to collaborate closely with our development team to craft the scope of each sprint in a realistic way.

Requirements

• Native English speaker.
• Able to work in US business hours every day.
• Friendly, amiable, easy to talk to.
• Astonishing listening skills.
• Project management experience.
• 2+ years of experience in a similar role of managing web-based software projects using agile, lean, or scrum methodologies.
• Ability to decipher ambiguous requirements and translate them into actionable tasks
• Ability to manage multiple projects simultaneously

Helpful skills

• Ability to set up and run a Ruby on Rails project in your local development environment.
• Ability to use Git, checkout source code, and comment on commits.
• Basic understanding of HTML & CSS.
• An eye for good design and the ability to create low-fidelity UI sketches and mockups.
• Understanding of relational databases and their conventions and requirements.

How we work

• You’ll be helping us build web apps for our clients, most of which are startups. Most of the time we’re building the first version of their product. Sometimes we’re redesigning an existing product.
• You don’t need to be a coder, but you do need to be comfortable with code. You’ll certainly spend a lot of time in Sketch or Photoshop, but you’ll also be putting together CSS and HTML in the live web application environment.
• You’ll be managing multiple projects at once. Each project has a dedicated developer, but you’ll need to have your hands on several at once. A typical day will consist of checking in with each developer and seeing how things are going with their project, reviewing pull requests, checking product quality, and communicating with each client.
• This job is 100% remote. Though you’re welcome to come in to work in our Elgin, TX office (near Austin), you’ll have ultimate flexibility over your own working schedule and environment.
• We promote a distraction-free work environment. Our work style is modeled after 37signals’ successful approach to productive remote work. We even use Basecamp as our primary communication tool.
• We write. Because we don’t have the opportunity to chat over the water cooler, we write A LOT to keep each other in the loop. Basecamp is our water cooler, and we use the message board, Campfire, and check-ins extensively to keep each other up to date on what were working on.
• You’ll also be encouraged to write for our company blog. One to three articles per year should just about do it, although we wouldn’t stop you from writing more frequently. Topics include MVP issues, product design, UI/UX, startup launch stories, and best/worst practices for startups. Writing for your personal blog is also A-OK.
• We consistently deliver high-quality work. All our products are rigorously tested before we deliver them to our clients. You’ll be expected to review new features in the browser, record any bugs, and make note of any usability issues.
• We have a zero-bug policy. Our Zero Bug Policy is simple: All bugs take priority over new features and improvements. That’s all
• We sometimes work together. Through the magic of the Internet, we sometimes will video conference via Zoom, or we might pair program for a while to work out a difficult problem. If you happen to live near Austin, Texas, then we might even get to work together in person sometimes.
• We learn on the job. We love learning and are never content with what we already know. As a company, we devote time and resources to learning and expanding our knowledge library. Openness to learning new things is essential. You’ll be expected and encouraged to build your skills and add to your personal toolbox. We encourage self-directed learning, but we may also want you to pursue some particular thread of knowledge for a particular project.

About Booster Stage

We build great products for the web.

Most of our work involves creating brand-new web apps for businesses who are launching a new product. We often work with startups, and we have also worked for big organizations who act like startups.

We’re a tiny family-owned business. Literally a mom and pop shop. Ryan and Bethany, the owners, have been building stuff for the web since 2004, and we’ve gotten really good at building new products for startups. Over the years we’ve created numerous websites and products for the web.