Humbly Confident Technical Product Manager

About Us and Why We’re Hiring

We’re YNAB (“why-nab”), a financial education company with a spendfulness app that helps people all over the world spend their money (guilt-free!) on what matters most to them. For over 20 years, YNAB’s proven method has been changing lives—and people can’t stop telling their friends about the difference it’s made. Think: debt paid off, marriages strengthened, goals achieved, stress erased, and sleep finally restored. But don’t just take our word for it—dive into our vibrant communities on Facebook, TikTok, and Reddit (really!) or skim through our glowing app reviews. You’ll quickly see why people rave about YNAB and why we’re so passionate about creating something that truly changes lives for the better.

That’s no small task for our product teams, who navigate incredibly complex problems ranging from the psychology of spending money to the intricacies of Open Banking legislation. We also have an entire product group dedicated solely to improving our infrastructure, and we’ve decided it’s time to hire another technically-minded Product Manager to join that effort. You’re the person we’re looking for if the idea of making YNAB the app and YNAB the workplace more scalable, resilient, and joyful lights a fire under your tuchus. 

What we’re looking for:

We have three hard requirements for this role—you must:

• Have at least three years of experience as a Product Manager.
• Have a strong technical background. (This can come in many forms; we’d love to hear about yours.)
• Live somewhere between the Pacific Time Zone (UTC-8) and the Central European Time Zone (UTC+1).

Beyond that, we’re open-minded. We value a diversity of experience and skills at YNAB, and every career path is different. That said, it may help you be successful in this role if you also have:

• Experience in the SaaS industry.
• Experience with things like: complex, data-rich applications; developer-facing products; cross-platform code sharing; legacy system migrations; developer documentation and architectural guidelines; analytics pipelines and data warehouses; security best practices; cross-platform release planning and execution; third party APIs; and infrastructure improvements that raise the tide for all the boats—er, product teams—they touch.
• A deep love for cross-functional product development (we really mean that cross-functional part!).

A bit about life at YNAB:

That’s a super brief intro to what we’re looking for. But first, you need to know if you’ll even like working with us. We’d love to share more about YNAB, and then we’ll get into (many) more details about this role.

YNAB was founded in 2004 and we haven’t taken on any outside funding—we’re established, profitable, and in this for the long haul. We have one overarching requirement when it comes to joining our team: our original Core Value Manifesto has to really click with you. If you’re nodding emphatically while reading it, you’ll probably really like it here, and we can’t wait to hear from you!

We live our Core Values every day at YNAB, and we mean it when we say we are an equal-opportunity employer. We believe that a diversity of backgrounds, abilities, beliefs, and experiences is critical to our success, and we are passionate about creating a welcoming, supportive, and collaborative environment for all employees. All are encouraged to apply as we continue to grow a smart, hard-working, and diverse team that loves working together to build something that matters.

We also work really hard, together, to make working at YNAB an amazing experience, and we’re (humbly) proud to have received many of Fortune's "great place to work" awards over the last several years, including #1 two years in a row! We have a team full of truly exceptional people—the kind you’ll be excited to work with. We’d love to introduce you to a few of them!

Who you’ll be working with:

We’re talking product management here, so you’ll be working with a lot of different people. We can’t even list them all, really. So we’ll start with a few of your closest collaborators:

Hannah is the Group Product Manager for our infrastructure effort, and she’d also be your manager. She loves building empowered, innovative, and trust-filled teams and is deeply invested in helping individuals and communities change their financial narratives and realities. She has a penchant for prepositional phrases and an abiding absorption with acronyms (and alliteration). She’s also a dancer and performing artist, and she does a fantastic British queen accent.

Buffy, our Director of Engineering, has been a Buffy since before Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and one of her life regrets is not buying buffy.com while she was in college. She loves a good debugging session and a well-placed Taylor Swift reference. When she’s not cleaning up our infrastructure, she’s probably knitting socks, biking, or otherwise frolicking outdoors with her family.

Brady is one of our full stack developers, and he’s been with YNAB since before our SaaS launch. He’s a self-declared geek which means you might catch him fiddling with a Raspberry Pi or flying his drone. Oh, and his awesome wife made us all YNAB decals for our laptops!

And as we said above, you’ll also cross paths with—well—probably everyone else. People like Becky and Eebs (a couple of our developers), Emily and Jack (both designers), Aaron (our Director of Product), Kendal and Carolyn (our Security Lead and Legal Counsel, respectively), and Eileen (a digital marketing specialist).

How You’ll Work at YNAB

Still with us? Now that you’ve met some of your potential future teammates, let’s talk more about YNAB as a company. Here’s how we operate:

Live (Almost) Anywhere You Want

We’ve always been a fully remote team, and have people all over the world. For this role, you’ll need to be located somewhere between the Pacific Time Zone (UTC-8) and the Central European Time Zone (UTC+1). Proximity doesn’t influence productivity, but it sure does help with communication. Wherever you are, just make sure you have a reliable internet connection—like, a really good one. Please.

Work Four Days a Week

We’ve adopted a four-day work week (still 100% paid!) and rarely work more than that. There are occasions and seasons where things get busy and people put some extra time in—but then we encourage them to take some extra time off, too. We’re a product-led organization that takes our work-life balance seriously, so we all prioritize working hard and smart, but at a measured pace. We care deeply about what we do, but we also love our families and about 2,000 other things. We have perspective and, ultimately, we think it makes us—and our work—even better.

Flex Your Work Schedule

We’re fully remote, so a lot of our work is done asynchronously, but we love working together in real time when it makes sense. We try to schedule most meetings between 12-3 pm Eastern time (16:00-19:00 UTC) Monday-Thursday. Outside of your meetings, we trust you to set your own schedule by balancing your team’s needs with your own needs. You don’t need to ask for permission to take off early one afternoon to see the doctor, or be “active” on Slack if you’re working deeply on a project. We look at what you accomplish—not when or how long you're in front of a computer.

Take Vacation (Seriously)

We want you to take vacation. In fact, we have a minimum vacation policy of three weeks per year. Five weeks feels about right (plus two extra weeks for our company-wide December Break). It’s important to get plenty of downtime and to get out and do something. We’ll look forward to seeing pictures of your adventures in our #office-wall Slack channel!

Meet the Team IRL

Some of our best work (and bonding!) is done in person. You’ll generally have the opportunity to meet with your YNAB teammates at least once a year, at a small-team work-focused meetup or at our company retreat. At the YNAB retreat, we love to catch up on spreadsheets and powerpoints in a Best Western conference room. Just kidding. (It’s actually hard to write that sentence, even knowing it’s a joke.) So far, we’ve gone to Costa Rica, a gigantic cabin in the mountains, a beach house in the Outer Banks, a ranch in Montana, Laguna Beach, Palm Springs, and most recently, Cape Cod. We work together, play together, and reinforce the bonds we’ve made as a team and company. Every time we meet up, we leave refreshed, motivated, and excited for the year ahead together.

Up Your Game

We’re serious about helping you improve your craft. It’s one of our favorite spending categories, and it’s the most important work of our managers. Think conferences, online courses and subscriptions, dedicated time away from work to learn something new… It's really up to you and your manager. We love to see our people grow!

Other Benefits

Our team is spread all over the world—mostly in the United States, but also in the UK, Canada, Germany, Brazil, Mexico, and several other countries. Team members who live in the US or UK are set up as employees, and those who live in other countries set themselves up as independent contractors. No matter where you live, you’re eligible for our generous paid family leave, vacation, holidays, and sick time.

If you’re in the US, we also offer fantastic medical, dental, and vision insurance, where we cover 100% of the premium for you and your family. No need to check your vision, you read that right—100%. (Although if you did need to check your vision, NBD, we’ve got you covered!) We also have a Traditional and Roth 401(k) option, where YNAB matches your contributions up to six percent, and matches vest immediately. (Are you a personal finance junkie like our founder Jesse? He set up YNAB’s 401k to have the lowest fee structure possible, where all plan costs are paid by YNAB, not your retirement nest egg. The investment funds available are fantastic, passively-managed, ultra low-cost index funds. You’re not a PF junkie? Trust us, it’s awesome.) If you’re in the UK, we also contribute six percent to your pension.

Competitive Compensation

At YNAB, we’re committed to equitable, market-driven, data-based compensation and we aim to offer a competitive benefits package to our team members. The starting salary for this role will be between $110,000 - $140,000 USD annually (with the top of that range reserved only for the most experienced candidates). If we decide to make you an offer, we’ll determine the most appropriate number based on what we know about your experience and competency for the role, and then we’ll make you our best offer and hope that you accept! If you join our team, you’ll also be eligible for a raise once a year and for our profit-share twice a year. (YNAB wins, you win—that kind of thing.)

A Few Final Tidbits

• Once you start, we DEMAND (in a friendly, ALL CAPS IS YELLING way) that you fill out your “Bucket List” spreadsheet with 50 items. (That’s harder than it sounds!) 
• We love to celebrate with you when you complete something on your bucket list—AND, we love using your bucket list as inspiration for your best birthday present(s) ever. 
• We want you firing on all cylinders, so we’ll set you up with a shiny new computer and replace it every three years.  
• Did we mention that YNAB makes a huge, positive difference in people’s lives? You may not think that matters much, but then a few months down the road, you’ll realize it’s made your job really, really enjoyable. Don’t underestimate this one!

If this sounds like your ideal environment, read on because now we want to talk about you, and how you’ll play a big part in changing people’s lives.

Now back to you, our new Technical Product Manager....

Here at YNAB, we believe that good ideas can come from anywhere, so we strive to be cross-functional in all phases of product development. As a Product Manager, you won’t be a gatekeeper or the hub in a hub-and-spoke system—you’ll connect and empower people and ideas, often getting out of the way to enable your colleagues to do their best work. In collaboration with your product teammates and stakeholders across the organization, you’ll help chart and manifest the best path to achieving our company goals through rigorous discovery, rapid experimentation, skillful prioritization, and iterative delivery. Along the way, you’ll encounter a lot of paradoxical truths and part of your job will be to navigate how to move from “either/or” to “yes/and.”

Product management is inherently messy (and beautifully so), but most of your day-to-day work will fall into one of these buckets:

• Determining what to work on (and why);
• Participating in the how; 
• Sharing the responsibility for execution; 
• And acting as the grease (not the glue). 

To determine what to work on (and why), you’ll:

• Become an expert on the business, the product, the customers we are serving (and the ones we are not), our capabilities, the marketplace, industry trends, and potential disruptions. You’ll do this by synthesizing previously gathered data, opinions, experiences, and history along with conducting your own qualitative and quantitative research. We’ve been around for 20 years but we know that the market is always changing, and the best way to stay in sync with our customers is by speaking with them directly!  
• Use your research to refine your team’s priorities, test your assumptions, and validate your hypotheses.
• Map the team’s work from a long-term vision (we’re talking years ahead), to all the possible ideas from all the possible sources, to the short-term roadmap of execution: what are we going to build, what are we not going to build, and in what order should we act?
• Navigate countless trade-offs (okay, maybe not countless, but hundreds wouldn’t be an exaggeration). Searching for a true win-win is the happiest path, but sometimes constraints are constraints. You know the former from the latter and have the vision and pragmatism to know when to keep digging and when to move on. 
• Define the key indicators that would show your team is on the right track, as well as the ones that would show the opposite.
• Communicate clearly and repeatedly (evangelize!) the value and strategic purpose of the work your product team is delivering.
• Be intensely curious. Period.

To participate in the “how”, you’ll:

• Act as a critical sounding-board for product designers and engineers, articulating the problem to be solved and managing scope throughout both the discovery and delivery phases of product development. You’re not afraid to ask questions and in fact, have a knack for knowing when to ask the right ones to help your team move forward.
• Monitor the effort and resources involved in each approach your team considers, always keeping one eye on the future and one eye on the here and now. You have a finely tuned spidey sense for how different work streams will impact each other and you love a good scheme if it means getting more value in the hands of users faster.  
• Meet your colleagues where they are—you can speak the languages of engineering and/or product design when needed to evaluate a tradeoff or understand a blocker—and help bring everyone back to the user and their experience. 

In sharing the responsibility for execution, you’ll:

• Understand that accountability is ultimately shared in our collaborative, cross-functional work—but also be willing and able to provide direction and make decisions when choices are not obvious. (In fact, you love when that happens. You’re the type of person who expounds on decision-making strategies for way too long at summer barbecues, but somehow keeps people listening.)
• Take on some project management responsibilities. This isn’t the core of your work, but since you sit at the center of a lot of information flow, you’ll naturally also facilitate a fair amount of process and planning conversations, and keep the trains on the track, so to speak.
• Define launch plans, manage release cycles, and conduct retrospectives in collaboration with stakeholders from across the company.

In acting as the grease (not the glue), you’ll:

• Communicate relentlessly to ensure that your team is aligned and the dots are being connected between the work of your team, the work of other teams, and our overarching strategy.
• Collaborate with engineers and product designers (and other stakeholders as needed—you know when to ask for help!) to validate assumptions and weed out bad ideas. You’ll also play a key role in evaluating work-in-progress.
• Communicate your team’s roadmap and release timelines to the rest of the organization, especially around high-visibility launches. You are relentless about ensuring that everyone is aligned because you know this clarity allows others to take confident actions.

That’s a whopping sixteen bullets, but let’s still say that your success as a Product Manager at YNAB comes down to this: Your ability to approach product development as holistic, simultaneous, problem-solving of both user and business goals. 

And if we haven’t yet spilled enough metaphorical ink on this idea: We work collaboratively here so you’ll listen to ideas, questions, and critiques from teammates with grace and patience—not because that’s nice, but because you see this as critical to our shared success. That said, you know your stuff and when the rubber hits the road you can both make hard calls and eloquently and logically explain them.

How to Apply

Apply here by Sunday, January 26th at 11:59pm PT. Firm. It’s a real deadline. The kind you love.

What to include in your application:

• A resume. If you don’t have an updated formal resume, that’s fine! An informal overview of your work history and education is all we’re looking for.
• A cover letter and answers to three questions. But not your typical cover letter. You have our permission to NOT be formal, just help us get to know you. 
  • On page 1: We’d love for you to tell us a bit about yourself, why you’re interested in this role at YNAB, and why you think you’d be a great fit. Please also be sure to describe your technical background, and share what drew you to the technical side of product management.
  • On page 2 onward: Please answer these questions three: 
    1. Imagine you’re our new Technical Product Manager (yay!) and your team has been working diligently on a suite of enhancements to our internal design component library. Everyone’s really excited about this work! One day, you get a message from your manager: they need to temporarily pull you and your team off of the component library enhancements. The company is investing in a new third-party tool that will increase the customer support team’s capacity to provide personalized guidance and troubleshooting and they want your team to lead the implementation. It’s an important and potentially high-impact project, but you know your team is going to be disappointed and maybe even a little frustrated. It has not been easy to build momentum on the component library enhancements and you know how the developers feel about third-party integrations. Please draft a 1-2 paragraph message as though you’re writing directly to the team, explaining the situation and hyping them up for the next few months of work.
    2. What is the most important feedback a manager has ever given you? Why? Please answer in 1-2 paragraphs.
    3. We love someone with a perspective about product development. Answer, in one paragraph: How early is too early to ship? How late is too late?
• Answers to eight quick, informational questions, which include things like your contact information, location, and relevant experience for the role.

A few final notes:

• We hope that you’ll feel free to be genuinely yourself in your application. We want to get to know you, not ChatGPT.
• Though we know it’s customary in some areas, please do not share a headshot anywhere in your application materials.
• You’ll only be able to apply once, so make sure your answers are final before you click submit. You can always start your application, and then click the “Save application for later” link at the bottom to—you guessed it—finish it up later. (Note: that link will have an expiration date! Check your email for more information if you choose this option.)
• Our goal is to make the recruitment and hiring process as accessible as possible. If we can help you with an accessibility need, email us at accommodations@ynab.com and indicate in the subject line that you’re applying for the Technical Product Manager role. (Please note that we can only respond to messages related to accommodations at this email.)
• Finally, please click here for an outline of what this hiring process will look like. It’s rigorous, but we also hear that it’s fun (truly!). We enjoy getting to know you throughout, and we make sure you have plenty of chances to get to know us, too. 

We’re excited to hear from you!

P.S. If you’re not interested in this position right now, but know someone who might be, we’d appreciate you passing this along!