Senior Staff Product Manager

SubBase•San Diego, CA

12h•Remote

About The Position

This is not a traditional PM role. SubBase operates an AI-native product development model — and that's not a buzzword we put in job descriptions. It's how we actually build. Our PMs use tools like Cursor, Claude Code, and Vercel daily to prototype, build internal tools, ship lightweight UI, and accelerate their own workflows. Our engineers pair with AI agents. We hire technologists who adopt new tools fast — whether that's AI, a new analytics platform, or a project management system — because genuine curiosity about how things work is what lets a small team punch above its weight. Right now, AI fluency is where that shows up most clearly: if you're the kind of PM who reaches for an AI tool before a slide deck, who prototypes in code before writing a spec, you'll feel at home here. The Role We're hiring a Senior Product Manager to own the enterprise product experience at SubBase. For our largest customers, procurement isn't one workflow — it's an interconnected system: buying from distributors, managing inventory and rental equipment, syncing data back to ERPs and accounting systems, and making all of that feel like a single platform rather than a patchwork of tools. This role owns that full surface area. That means you'll think about the product and the infrastructure together. You'll drive trade workflows like distributor integrations and inventory management while also owning the data and integration layer that connects SubBase to your customers' existing tech stacks. The best enterprise PM for this role won't see those as separate workstreams — they'll see them as one customer problem. You'll work directly with our engineering, design, and customer teams — and with our customers themselves, on job sites and in their offices. The role is deeply technical, deeply customer-facing, and central to SubBase's growth from Series A to Series B. In your first six months, you could be leading a major distributor integration launch, redesigning inventory management for enterprise scale, or architecting the data layer that connects SubBase to a customer's ERP. The work is concrete from day one.

Requirements

5–8+ years of product management experience, with a technical foundation — whether that's a CS/engineering background, time spent writing code earlier in your career, or deep fluency in how systems are built. You think in systems, not just features.
Rooted in operationally complex industries. Your career has been shaped by logistics, supply chain, manufacturing, field services, construction, or similar domains where software meets messy real-world operations. You understand that procurement isn't a clean digital workflow — it's trucks, job sites, warehouses, and people who need things to just work.
AI-fluent and tool-forward. You've used AI tools — Claude, Cursor, Copilot, or similar — in your actual work, and you adopt new tools quickly because you're genuinely curious, not because someone told you to. You're excited by the idea of PMs who prototype, ship UI, and build internal tools alongside engineers.
Deeply customer-empathetic. You actively seek out customer pain and use it to drive product decisions. You're comfortable in the field — on job sites, in procurement offices, wherever the real workflows happen.
A high bar for product craft and UX. You pay close attention to how great products work — not because you're a designer, but because you're curious and opinionated about how software should feel. You notice when a workflow has one too many steps, when a label is confusing, or when a competitor nailed an interaction pattern worth learning from. In construction software, where the bar for usability has historically been low, that instinct is a competitive advantage.
Willing to travel ~5–10 days per quarter for customer visits and internal team planning.

Nice To Haves

Integration and platform experience. You've built products that connect to external systems — ERPs, partner APIs, vendor platforms — not just internal features. You've navigated the complexity of making your platform the connective tissue between other people's tech stacks.
Data-driven and rigorous. You define key product metrics, run experiments, and execute analyses with tools like Heap, Sigma, Mode, or similar. You make decisions with evidence, not instinct alone.
Comfortable with enterprise complexity. You've navigated multi-stakeholder environments, managed competing priorities across customer segments, and made principled tradeoffs between customization and scale.

Responsibilities

Lead discovery efforts across SMB and enterprise customers to identify high-leverage product opportunities in your domain
Define and own the product strategy for your workstreams in alignment with company OKRs and SubBase's four strategic pillars
Synthesize qualitative feedback and quantitative signals into clear problem definitions and prioritized roadmaps
Navigate the tradeoffs between bespoke enterprise needs and scalable platform design — and make those tradeoffs legible to the team
Write clear product requirements, user stories, and acceptance criteria
Partner closely with engineering, design, and QA to scope, build, and ship high-quality features on a predictable cadence
Use AI tooling (Cursor, Claude Code, etc.) to prototype solutions, build internal tools, and accelerate your own workflow — we expect PMs to be hands-on builders, not just spec writers
Champion product polish and usability, ensuring that even complex procurement workflows feel intuitive
Run validation cycles — user interviews, prototype testing, data analysis — that keep development iterative and evidence-based
Participate in customer onboarding, implementation calls, and on-site visits to build deep empathy for construction procurement workflows
Partner with Customer Success, Sales, and Support to ensure successful rollout and adoption of new capabilities
Travel to customer job sites and offices (~5–10 days per quarter) for discovery sessions, user testing, and collaborative workshops
Contribute to cross-functional planning, roadmap reviews, and broader product strategy