Product Manager — First Product Hire

About The Role

Be the first product manager at an AI sales coaching startup one month into go-to-market, with several live pilots and paying clients in production. You'll own the path from pilot to revenue — activation, onboarding, and the roadmap discipline that turns customer feedback into a product instead of a pile of one-off fixes — working shoulder to shoulder with the head of sales and the CEO.

This is a building role — you'll prototype with AI tools yourself, write specs engineers ship from, and carry a revenue number, not a slide deck. Reports to the CEO.

A word of honesty

This is not a strategy seat, and we'd rather lose you here than three interviews in.

You will run pilot onboardings yourself and watch where customers stall. You will sit on calls with sales managers and translate "the hints disappear too fast" into a spec an engineer can build Thursday. You will prototype flows in our sandbox environment with AI tools — personally, hands on keyboard — because showing a working mock beats a two-week requirements cycle. You will tell a design partner "no, not this sprint," and tell the founder the same thing, with data.

And you'll inherit real problems we'll show you openly: every pilot today is delivered as a bespoke firefight; sprint scope balloons mid-cycle because nobody guards the gate; customer feedback lands as scattered tickets instead of roadmap decisions. We're not hiring someone to observe this. We're hiring the person who ends it.

If your best work is frameworks, decks, and alignment meetings, this is the wrong role. If your best work is a number that went up because you found what was blocking it and shipped the fix — read on.

What you'll own

Pilot-to-revenue conversion. We already have several live pilots and paying clients — and we sign them faster than we activate them. You'll own the playbook: success criteria agreed upfront, onboarding that doesn't require an engineer in the room, the moment of proven value, the expansion conversation. You'll run activation as a three-way operation with the head of sales and the CEO: they open and close, you make the value land and stick. Your number is paid conversion, not feature throughput.

Activation and onboarding. Today, getting started can depend on call-recorder integrations and manual setup. You'll own time-to-first-value for both the rep (extension installed → first useful signal) and the manager (data connected → first insight they screenshot for their boss).

The feedback-to-roadmap engine. Pilots generate constant feedback. You'll turn it from per-client firefighting into product decisions: what generalizes, what's a config, what we decline. One customer's request becomes every customer's feature — or it doesn't get built.

Prioritization as a discipline. Engineering capacity is seven people. You'll guard sprint scope, sequence ruthlessly against revenue, and make the trade-offs explicit — so the team finishes what it starts.

Specs and prototypes. Tickets engineers can build without guessing: the user, the trigger, the edge cases, what done means. When words aren't enough, you build the prototype yourself in our prototyping environment and put it in front of a customer that week.

The metric system. Our north star is signal usefulness — the share of live coaching signals that were both impactful and acted on. You'll instrument the funnel around it, define what we measure at every stage, and make the numbers the shared language between product, engineering, and sales.

Demand experiments. What attracts a client is product knowledge too. You'll run lightweight experiments on the demand side — positioning, landing-page and onboarding messaging, which entry point converts (free gap analysis, extension install, roleplay demo) — and feed what you learn back into both the product and the sales motion.

What success looks like — first weeks

• circle]:fill-d-green [&>circle]:stroke-d-green [&>path]:stroke-white" aria-hidden="true"> Run a pilot onboarding end-to-end yourself; map exactly where customers stall and why.
• circle]:fill-d-green [&>circle]:stroke-d-green [&>path]:stroke-white" aria-hidden="true"> Take the sprint intake gate from the CEO's hands: nothing enters mid-cycle without a trade-off decision.
  
  

What success looks like — first 90 days

• circle]:fill-d-green [&>circle]:stroke-d-green [&>path]:stroke-white" aria-hidden="true"> A documented pilot playbook with explicit success criteria — and the first pilots converting against it.
• circle]:fill-d-green [&>circle]:stroke-d-green [&>path]:stroke-white" aria-hidden="true"> Customer feedback flows through one funnel into roadmap decisions; per-client firefighting visibly drops.
• circle]:fill-d-green [&>circle]:stroke-d-green [&>path]:stroke-white" aria-hidden="true"> Activation is measured, and time-to-first-value has a number that's going down.
  
  

What success looks like — first 6–12 months

• circle]:fill-d-green [&>circle]:stroke-d-green [&>path]:stroke-white" aria-hidden="true"> Pilot-to-paid conversion is a predictable motion, not a heroic one.
• circle]:fill-d-green [&>circle]:stroke-d-green [&>path]:stroke-white" aria-hidden="true"> A roadmap the whole company can recite, sequenced against revenue, that survives contact with new customer demands.
• circle]:fill-d-green [&>circle]:stroke-d-green [&>path]:stroke-white" aria-hidden="true"> The founder is selling and raising — not project-managing sprints.
  
  

Who you are

• circle]:fill-d-green [&>circle]:stroke-d-green [&>path]:stroke-white" aria-hidden="true"> You've driven revenue at an early-stage B2B startup — owned activation, conversion, or expansion through finding product-market fit, and you can name the numbers you moved and how. This is the non-negotiable.
• circle]:fill-d-green [&>circle]:stroke-d-green [&>path]:stroke-white" aria-hidden="true"> Technical for real: you read code well enough to challenge an estimate, you understand APIs, webhooks, and what an LLM pipeline can and can't do — and you build working prototypes yourself with modern AI tools. You don't need an engineer to make your ideas tangible.
• circle]:fill-d-green [&>circle]:stroke-d-green [&>path]:stroke-white" aria-hidden="true"> You've lived inside excellent B2B product culture — the Monday/Wix school of customer experience — or you've built toward that bar at a smaller company and can show it.
• circle]:fill-d-green [&>circle]:stroke-d-green [&>path]:stroke-white" aria-hidden="true"> You know sales as a domain, or you learn domains fast and prove it: our users are SDRs, AEs, and the managers who coach them, and you'll need to speak their language by week three.
• circle]:fill-d-green [&>circle]:stroke-d-green [&>path]:stroke-white" aria-hidden="true"> Evidence over opinion: you watch session recordings, sit on customer calls, and instrument before you argue.
• circle]:fill-d-green [&>circle]:stroke-d-green [&>path]:stroke-white" aria-hidden="true"> Direct and candid with founders and engineers alike — you'd rather surface the uncomfortable trade-off than manage around it.
  
  

Nice to have

• circle]:fill-d-secondary-gray [&>circle]:stroke-d-secondary-gray [&>path]:stroke-white" aria-hidden="true"> Experience with sales tech or revenue tooling (CRM, conversation intelligence, enablement).
• circle]:fill-d-secondary-gray [&>circle]:stroke-d-secondary-gray [&>path]:stroke-white" aria-hidden="true"> PLG funnel experience.
• circle]:fill-d-secondary-gray [&>circle]:stroke-d-secondary-gray [&>path]:stroke-white" aria-hidden="true"> Hands-on marketing experimentation — you've tested messaging, landing pages, or campaigns and can read the results honestly.
• circle]:fill-d-secondary-gray [&>circle]:stroke-d-secondary-gray [&>path]:stroke-white" aria-hidden="true"> Having been a founder or first PM before.
  
  

Who this role isn't for

• circle]:fill-d-secondary-gray [&>circle]:stroke-d-secondary-gray [&>path]:stroke-white" aria-hidden="true"> PMs whose main output is documents about what others should build.
• circle]:fill-d-secondary-gray [&>circle]:stroke-d-secondary-gray [&>path]:stroke-white" aria-hidden="true"> Anyone who needs a research team, a data team, and a quarter of discovery before making a call.
• circle]:fill-d-secondary-gray [&>circle]:stroke-d-secondary-gray [&>path]:stroke-white" aria-hidden="true"> Those who want to manage product managers — there's nobody to manage. There's a product to grow.
  
  

Why this role matters

We have a product customers love in pilots, a team that ships fast, and live clients waiting to be activated well. The constraint is no longer building — it's converting what we build into repeatable revenue. The first PM at a company at this stage doesn't inherit a product machine; they build it. What you set up in the next twelve months — the playbook, the funnel, the discipline — is what the company scales on.

What we offer

The first product seat, reporting directly to the CEO, with real authority over roadmap and the pilot motion. Competitive salary plus meaningful equity — early enough that it matters. Performance-based comp tied to the revenue you drive. Bi-annual team retreats abroad. And live customers from day one — no six-month wait to see your decisions hit the market.

About Yolk

A sales rep tracks nine things at once on a live call. Human working memory holds four. Every AI sales tool tries to add more dashboards on top. We subtract — Yolk's AI coach works inside the live call, surfacing the one right thing to say at the moment it matters, then turns what broke down on the call into targeted AI roleplay practice afterward.

The facts: launched end of May 2026. Hundreds of salespeople coached in the first weeks, across several live pilots and paying clients. Thousands of real sales calls already analyzed. Backed by investors in Anthropic and Groq. SOC 2 compliant, 4 patents in core AI methods.