Product Manager

About Kinetic

Kinetic Automation is pioneering effortless modern vehicle repair. Kinetic uses proprietary AI and autonomous robotics technology to automate vehicle maintenance and simplify repair administration for collision shops, dealerships, and insurance carriers. Kinetic’s service hubs and intake centers ensure accurate calibration, rapid turnaround, and predictable costs for the rapidly growing ADAS and EV ecosystem. The company has financial backing from top-tier investors, including Menlo Ventures, Lux Capital, and Construct Capital. For more information, visit www.kinetic.auto.

About the role

As a Product Manager, you will lead the product strategy, roadmap, and detailed design for the suite of Kinetic Ops Apps we use to manage interaction with customers and vehicle flow in our hubs. Our team across 10+ hubs uses these every day to run their workflow. Customers use them to schedule and track cars, download documentation, view invoices, and pay us. Ops Apps is a big part of what gives Kinetic a modern, delightful customer experience vs. a traditional auto repair shop.

You’ll be responsible for Ops Apps at multiple different levels: overall strategy and customer value prop, internal workflows for our team, detailed designs for features and business logic, look and feel of the final product, and the under the hood software architecture. The ideal candidate will be able to hold all these levels in their head at once – always thinking about the big picture and how to craft a compelling product narrative, but with a sharp eye for detail that allows us to ship professional looking, well executed software to customers.

The best candidates will have demonstrated experience bringing structure to uncertainty. Even though our business runs on Ops Apps, the product is very much still young, and there are many opportunities for refinement and expansion. We’ll expect you to take that large-but-poorly-defined opportunity, and turn it into a concrete roadmap and artifacts – PRDs, design docs, wireframes, flow charts – that our team can execute on. We’d love to hear about other portfolio projects where you’ve done this.

We value simplicity, reliability, rapid iteration, and shipping products that work. We use mature, well tested tools and eschew flashy trends whenever possible. Ops Apps are a core part of Kinetic’s business and have a significant effect on our customers’ efficiency - the design, reliability, and usability of the product must reflect that.

This is an in person role. We’ve found in person communication to be critical to our development velocity and business success. We also believe that spending time around brilliant coworkers and cool robots is one of the biggest perks of working at Kinetic.

Qualifications

• BS/MS in Computer Science, Business, or related field
• 5+ years of product management experience
• Proven experience in software product development (preferably SaaS or B2B)
• Demonstrated ability to define and prioritize complex product roadmaps
• Strong data analysis skills and a data-driven approach to product development
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to effectively collaborate with technical teams
• Ability to work in person in Oakland, CA

Desired Personal Qualities

• Strong customer empathy: ability to understand user needs and translate them into product requirements
• Cross-functional leadership: ability to align engineering, design, and operations toward a shared vision
• Data-driven mindset: uses evidence and metrics to guide prioritization and decision making
• Excellent written communication and collaboration skills
• Likes the idea of fast iteration cycles for deep-tech products with direct customer feedback
• Deep intellectual curiosity and a relentless attention to detail
• Loves robots

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