Director of Product Management

LawnStarter • Austin, TX

22h • Remote

About The Position

LawnStarter is seeking its first Director of Product Management to lead a team of three Product Managers. This role is positioned between the VP of Product and the PMs, with the primary goal of driving value across growth, retention, and profitability by building a superior product for both customers and service Pros. The Director will be instrumental in scaling the company from one profitable vertical to multiple, while also enhancing the core lawn service offering. This is a unique opportunity to define the team's operating model and establish the standard for product craft, rather than inheriting an existing structure. The role requires a systems-thinking approach due to the complex, interconnected nature of a marketplace where decisions have far-reaching effects across customers, Pros, and the business. The Director will act as a player-coach, multiplying the efforts of a strong existing team and contributing directly to the hardest problems, alongside strategic bets and patient optimization.

Key responsibilities include leading and developing the PM team, owning the prioritization of a shared roadmap with careful consideration of growth, retention, and profitability tradeoffs, developing a repeatable multi-service strategy, and directing the integration of AI and agents into the product. The Director will partner closely with cross-functional teams, earning their trust through sound decision-making. The role involves solving complex problems such as abstracting a single product into a multi-service platform that accommodates diverse service economics and workflows, prioritizing competing goals with finite resources, and building for an agent-native future where AI plays a significant role for both buyers and workers.

Requirements

• AI-native and agent-curious. You use AI every day and push the team to do the same.
• You believe agents are the next platform shift, and you're energized by the open question of what an agent-driven world means for LawnStarter — a genuine thought partner on it, not someone who shows up with all the answers.
• A player-coach who multiplies talent. You get extraordinary outcomes from already-strong people — coaching, raising the bar, unblocking — and you still do the hardest work yourself when it counts.
• You know the difference between leading and controlling.
• A systems thinker. You see inputs, rules, feedback loops, and second-order effects, and you hold the customer side and the Pro side in your head as one connected machine.
• A brutal prioritizer. You say no well — you sequence ruthlessly, kill good-but-not-now work, and protect the team's focus.
• A great cross-functional partner. You earn the trust of designers, engineers, data, finance, and ops by speaking their language and making decisions they respect.
• Obsessive about scoping and user experience. You cut scope to the essential and sweat how the product actually feels to use.

Nice To Haves

• This is unlikely to be a good fit if you treat AI as a productivity hack.
• This is unlikely to be a good fit if you need to "fix" a broken team to feel useful, or if you've moved fully into management and don't want to touch the product directly.
• This is unlikely to be a good fit if you think in isolated features and miss how a change ripples through the rest of the system.
• This is unlikely to be a good fit if you avoid the hard conversations prioritization requires.
• This is unlikely to be a good fit if you treat other functions as service providers rather than partners.
• This is unlikely to be a good fit if you ship the first version that technically works without caring whether it's genuinely good.
• Not a pure people-management role. You lead a team and stay in the work — the hardest problems are yours to help solve, not just to assign. If you don't want to touch a spec again, this isn't it.
• A solo-IC role. You lead and grow a team. If you want to own a domain alone with no reports, look at our Senior PM roles instead.
• A turnaround. The team is already strong. If you're energized by fixing broken teams, this won't scratch that itch.
• A fit for an AI skeptic. We believe the agent shift is real and urgent. If you're not convinced, you'll be fighting the company's direction.
• A role with a finished playbook. Multi-service and agent-native product are things we're figuring out as we go. If you need established processes and proven paths, this will be frustrating.

Responsibilities

• Lead, coach, and multiply three already-strong PMs — and hire more as we grow.
• Own the growth/retention/profitability tradeoffs on one shared roadmap — what gets built, what waits, what we kill.
• Turn one proven vertical into a repeatable playbook across services, designing for customers and Pros as one system.
• Own how AI and agents show up in what we build — for our team, our customers, and our Pros.
• Be the product leader the rest of the company trusts to make the right calls.
• Abstracting one product into a multi-service platform.
• Price any service by location and job complexity?
• Guarantee quality on every job, not just lawns?
• Decide what generalizes and what stays service-specific, then sequence the build to a second profitable vertical — a platform that absorbs that variation instead of forking under it.
• Own the sequencing and tradeoffs, and say no clearly and often, with reasons people respect.
• Build products to use agents (to move faster and serve customers and Pros better) and to serve agents (so the platform works when the buyer or the worker is an AI).

Benefits

• Equity : A significant leadership equity package. You'll have high impact on our growth, retention, and profitability. We want you invested in that outcome.
• Base salary : 200k - 230k
• Healthcare : Medical, dental, and vision.
• Fully remote : Work from anywhere in the US. Leading a distributed team and doing deep product work both require focus and trust — we give you both.
• Flexible PTO : We focus on results. Take what you need.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director
• Education Level: No Education Listed