Principal Product Manager

Note: Partly is headquartered in Austin, TX with offices in London, UK, Christchurch, NZ and Auckland, NZ. Wherever you're based, we'll connect you with your nearest office for onboarding, and fly you to join the full team for our quarterly "Season Openers" (we cover travel and accommodation). If you're relocating to join us, we can also assist with relocation costs.

🚀 Our Story

Partly is building the infrastructure for anyone to repair anything. We believe everything built should be repairable, and we're building frontier AI to put repair knowledge to work, starting with the $2tn automotive market.

Our model, Interpreter, is the first AI purpose-built to understand repair. Trained on 1M+ car models and 1B+ parts, it reads a repair job the way an estimator does, resolves damage into the exact purchasable part, and shows its reasoning with a confidence score. On real production jobs, an estimator working with Interpreter reaches 98.8% parts-list accuracy, against 92.1% with today's tools. It powers PartlyRepair, used by collision shops, workshops and suppliers to take the admin off the job; PartlyLabs, the agentic infrastructure enterprises use to deploy Interpreter across their own workflows; and a developer API.

Founded by ex-Rocket Lab engineers, we've raised a $50m Series B led by DST Global (Anthropic, Airbnb, Meta, TikTok, Spotify), with Blackbird Ventures, WNDR, Activant Capital, Icehouse Ventures, Square Peg, Airtree and Ecliptic Venture Capital. Hear it from the team: Why Partly exists and AI at Partly.

🖍️ This role

Insurers and work providers pay for the repair and set the rules it runs by. This role owns Partly's entire product relationship with them.

Partly creates value for insurers through three layers, and you own how all three land for this customer. Interpreter, our domain-specific AI foundation model, turns damage and estimate data into an accurate, complete parts picture early in the claim. Rails, our API layer, lets insurers and the systems they already run integrate directly with Partly's job processing infrastructure. And our agentic, highly automated user-level capabilities progressively absorb work that is manual across the industry today. Together these move the metrics an insurer is measured on: total cost of risk, cycle times, customer satisfaction, total loss rate and operational efficiency across the claims organisation.

You build for several distinct personas inside the insurer's workflow, each needing a different product on the same foundation: appraisers reviewing parts decisions and authorising spend; claims handlers and adjusters running the file; dispute and escalation teams revisiting jobs long after they close; network managers allocating work; and the parts, procurement and sustainability leads who set policy in the first place. You are the single accountable person for the value insurers get from Partly, and for what that unlocks across the rest of the network.

The remit is global, covering New Zealand, the UK and the US, with a strong first focus on the US, where you will be based. Claims structures, parts policy and competitive incumbents differ sharply across the three, so deciding what is genuinely one global product and what has to stay local is yours to call.

This is an enterprise product with a consumer-grade bar. You will be in the room before contracts exist, shaping pilots and building the artefacts that prove value, then making sure that same product expands and retains itself once the relationship is live.

The core challenge is trust at institutional scale. Automation advances only as fast as an insurer's confidence in it, so owning that trajectory, and the evidence and audit trail that makes each step defensible to a claims director, is the heart of the role.

You'll be operating at an inflection point. AI-assisted development is compressing discovery and delivery: the best PMs we know build rapid prototypes themselves, deploy them, read the signal and decide within days. We want someone already working that way, or building toward it.

💻 What you'll own

• The Insurer Experience, End-to-End. The full product experience for every insurer-side user across all markets: appraisers, claims handlers and adjusters, dispute and escalation teams, network managers, and parts, procurement and sustainability leads. Key metrics: NPS, time-to-value, appraiser time per claim, task completion rate, support contact rate.

• Insurer Rules and Compliance. Definition, administration and evolution of per-insurer parts rules, supplier waterfalls, thresholds and evidence requirements, codified in the product rather than administered by hand. Key metrics: rule compliance rate, appraiser approval rate, share of rules codified, time to configure a new insurer, per-job insurer attribution accuracy.

• Verification and Audit. Automating the manual claim verification insurer engineers perform today, and extending it into the value band nobody currently checks. Key metrics: share of claims verified without manual review, verification turnaround, engineer hours displaced, value recovered per verified claim.

• Insurer Intelligence and Reporting. The portfolio-level view of what an insurer's network actually bought, what was available at the moment of order, and how that performs across sites and over time, including the consent and permission model that makes named reporting legitimate. Key metrics: reporting adoption, availability-versus-uptake coverage, consent coverage, dispute rate and resolution time.

• Enterprise Product-Led Growth. The full insurer arc from pre-sales pilot through onboarding, activation, cohort expansion and network-wide mandate, treated as product design and instrumentation problems. Key metrics: pilot-to-contract conversion, time to first mandated cohort, cohort-to-network expansion, insurer seat and site expansion, net revenue retention.

• Automation and the Agentic Experience. The strategy for moving insurers from checking every job to supervising exceptions, including where the human stays in the loop, how delegated authority is earned, and how control is preserved as more runs autonomously. Key metrics: automation rate by workflow stage, share of stages completed via delegation, supervision and intervention rate, override frequency, delegated authority thresholds.

• Integration Experience. How Partly fits into the estimating platforms, claims systems and appraisal platforms insurers already run. A poor integration experience is a poor Partly experience, and it matters more, not less, as agents need clean context across systems. Key metrics: integration reliability, cross-system task completion rate, insurer-reported friction.
  

💻 What you'll do

Own your product, end-to-end

• Define and evolve the product vision, strategy and roadmap for insurer products globally, aligned with company direction and the wider platform.

• Continuously assess and improve Product-Market Fit across markets with materially different claims structures, parts policies and competitive incumbents.

• Decide deliberately what is global and what is local, and defend that line when a single account pushes on it.

• Own key product, growth and commercial metrics and use them to steer every decision.

• Act as the single accountable owner, for successes, failures and everything in between.

Stay close to customers

• Maintain direct, regular contact with appraisers, claims handlers and insurer decision-makers. This is a core weekly activity, not an occasional input.

• Sit with appraisers while they work a queue. Understand what they check, what they cannot see, and what would let them stop checking.

• Map the insurer's actual internal process, not the one on the org chart, and design against where the decision and the money really sit.

• Combine qualitative insight with quantitative usage and outcome data, and reconcile the two when they disagree.

Be in the room before the contract is

• Partner with Sales on enterprise pipelines: shape the pilot, build the artefacts that convert, and take the hard questions yourself.

• Design pilots that prove a mechanism rather than produce a flattering number, and hold the line on what the evidence actually supports.

• Turn what you learn in pre-sales directly into roadmap, and tell Sales plainly when the answer is no.

Build and ship, not just specify

• Prototype new product iterations yourself using AI-assisted development and LLM-assisted tooling: fast, disposable, real. We call this vibe coding; it is our default mode for product discovery.

• Treat the prototype as the hypothesis. Put it in front of a real appraiser before writing the spec.

• Work hands-on with data: define metrics, build dashboards, query the warehouse, read the signals directly.

• Know the difference between a causal claim and a selection effect, and design the measurement that separates them.

Lead in the human loop

• Partner closely with engineering leads to balance discovery, delivery and technical sustainability.

• Align GTM, Customer Success, operations and support across three regions around one product direction.

• Communicate priorities and reasoning clearly, especially when the answer is no.

• Represent the insurer's reality in every internal decision, as evidence rather than as a summary.

Lead in the agent loop

• Design and instrument feedback loops that let you learn from system behaviour alongside user behaviour.

• Define what working means for agentic and AI-driven features, in terms of evals, edge-case handling and observable outcomes.

• Own the trust trajectory: design how insurers move from checking everything to supervising exceptions, without ever losing the audit trail that makes it defensible.

• Think in systems: how does a decision on the insurer side change repairer and supplier behaviour across the whole network?

Raise the bar

• Contribute beyond your product boundary: cross-product coherence, shared principles and the overall product craft at Partly.

• Help define what excellent product ownership looks like here as the team grows.
  

🥷 What you bring

Non-negotiables

• Genuine customer obsession, with a demonstrated habit of spending time with users in their actual work context and a track record of that depth driving product direction.

• 5+ years owning complex, enterprise B2B software products end-to-end, with clear accountability for outcomes rather than delivery. Multi-persona, operational or workflow-heavy domains preferred.

• A strong personal track record in pre-sales engagement for enterprise pipelines: shaping pilots, building what converts, and carrying what you learn back into the roadmap.

• Proficiency with corporate process and process modelling. You can map how a large organisation really works and design product against it.

• A clear point of view on agentic product design: how an experience migrates from manual operation to supervised delegation, and how automation earns institutional trust progressively.

• Demonstrated PLG instincts inside an enterprise motion: onboarding, activation, expansion and retention as product design problems, with personal accountability for the numbers.

• Experience with API-first or integration-dependent products, and strong intuition for where cross-system friction quietly destroys value.

• You build rapid prototypes yourself, with AI-assisted tools, LLM-assisted development or code, as a first instinct for testing ideas.

• Strong analytical instinct: you define the metrics, build the view, read the data and act on it, without waiting for a data team.

• Excellent judgement in a multi-stakeholder environment where insurer, repairer and supplier interests compete, and where the paying customer is not the daily user.

• Working understanding of how US collision repair is funded and governed, including DRP and steering dynamics and alternative-parts cost pressure, and the right to work in the US.

Strong signals we look for

• Hands-on experience shipping AI-assisted or agent-driven workflows in production where the human stays in the loop.

• Experience in automotive, insurance, claims or equivalent operational verticals involving parts, supply chain or job management.

• Experience building products carrying compliance, audit or regulatory weight, where the record of what happened is part of the product.

• Exposure to marketplace or network dynamics from the demand side.

• Experience running one product across multiple geographies with genuinely different rules and incumbents.

• Founder background, or early employee at a startup that scaled materially.

• You've killed or radically changed something you personally believed in, and can explain why.

Bonus

• Relationships across the US carrier, TPA or claims-technology ecosystem.

• Familiarity with the estimating and claims platforms insurers run day to day.

• Experience selling or building against an entrenched incumbent.

• Experience building or operating products with meaningful agentic or automation components.
  

🧭 How you'll think and operate

We're not looking for framework experts or consensus-drivers. We're looking for someone who thinks like this:

• "I sat with two appraisers this week and watched them work a queue. Here's the one thing they check that we don't show them, and here's what I'm changing."

• "I built a version of the insurer report this afternoon. Their analyst will attack it on selection, so here's the cut that survives that."

• "Here's what the data shows. Here's what I think it means. Here's what I'm doing about it. Here's when I'll be wrong."

• "I own the insurer product. If it's broken, that's on me. Let me tell you exactly how it broke and what I'm doing about it."

Speed, ownership and judgement are the baseline. What differentiates the best candidates is the ability to move fluidly between the claims director's boardroom and the appraiser's screen, and to translate both into a product that holds up under scrutiny.

🪅 Benefits (US)
https://app.notion.com/p/partly/US-Benefits-3a72cf96686281e6ba36dd840193c3ec

📍 Location

United States - Austin, Texas. This is an in-office role with global product responsibility. New hires spend their first two weeks at HQ in Christchurch and one week per quarter thereafter; travel and accommodation covered. Expect regular travel to NZ and the UK, and to insurer customers across all three markets.

A note on bar

We're looking for someone rare. Not rare because of their title or the brands on their CV - rare because of how they think, what they own, and how they operate.

The insurer relationship is the lever that moves the entire network. If you've owned a product where the buyer sets the rules, the daily user is someone else, and trust had to be earned before anything could be automated — we want to talk to you.

If you're not sure you meet every requirement above but believe you could be exceptional here: apply anyway. Seriously.