Product Manager

gravity9 is a boutique IT consulting company headquartered in the UK with offices in the US, Canada, Poland, and Colombia. Our team has deep experience in engineering, experience design and product management. We enjoy a challenge and pride ourselves on working with our clients on their most complex problems, finding elegant and flexible solutions that help them transform their businesses.

The Role, Honestly

This isn't a job where you own one clean lane. You'll move between product owner, project manager, business analyst, tester, and support engineer — sometimes within the same hour. If you need a title to tell you what you're allowed to touch today, this isn't the right seat. If you'd rather have real ownership over a messy, high-impact problem than a narrow, well-defined one, it might be exactly right.

How This Role Breaks Down

This is directional rather than a weekly timesheet, but it reflects where the role's energy typically goes:

•     30% Product judgment & direction— customer problems, outcomes, prioritization, roadmap tradeoffs

•     30% Delivery & orchestration— backlog, dependencies, workstreams, and getting decisions to shipped software

•     25% Technical problem-solving— APIs, JSON, logs, data flows, troubleshooting, and getting to answers directly

•     15% Stakeholder leadership & communication— alignment, trust, decision-making, and effective collaboration across Poland and U.S. West Coast time zones

What You’ll Actually Do

•     Run point across a multi-vendor ecosystem — several platforms, several teams, no single source of truth — and be the person who can explain how they all connect.

•     Understand your users deeply enough to represent them accurately when they're not in the room.

•     Own the product direction for your area - connect customer needs, business priorities, and technical realities; define the outcomes that matter; and make the tradeoffs needed to keep the roadmap focused.

•     Workshop with users and stakeholders — both to turn vague frustration into a clear problem statement, and to shape new features from the ground up.

•     Translate business needs into clear requirements, and stay accountable for them all the way through to a working feature — not just a written spec.

•     Build and own the backlog, and work directly with developers to turn requirements into shipped software.

•     Dig into raw data (JSON payloads, API responses, logs) across multiple systems yourself when you need an answer faster than waiting on someone else's ticket queue.

•     Identify and own dependencies across teams and systems — know what's blocking what, and drive it, rather than waiting for someone else to surface it.

•     Maintain a clear view across multiple concurrent workstreams, knowing where the important risks, decisions, dependencies, and blockers are - and be able to explain the real status without having to reconstruct it on the spot.

•     Build genuine working relationships with the people you depend on — because when you don't own the system, trust is what gets things unblocked.

•     Work effectively across time zones - engineering teams are primarily in Poland while client stakeholders are on the U.S. West Coast. You'll need to be deliberate about handoffs, written communication, and making the overlap hours count.

•     Act as a fallback layer of technical support on the product when something breaks and the usual path isn't fast enough.

•     Say no when something doesn't serve the roadmap, even when it's an easy yes to give.

You’ll Thrive Here If You

•     Learn new domains fast and are comfortable operating in one before you've fully mastered it.

•     Can hold a strategic view and get into implementation details in the same conversation.

•     Are willing to form and share an opinion before you have complete information — and revise it in public when you're wrong.

•     Treat ambiguity as the normal condition of the job, not a blocker to raise up the chain.

•     Can bring calm and clarity to stakeholders even when the answer isn't obvious yet - and are comfortable saying what you know, what you don't know, and what you'll do next.

This Probably Isn’t A Fit For You If

•     You want a job with a fixed scope and a quiet backlog.

•     You'd rather escalate ambiguity than sit with it and make a call.

•     You need full system access and a clean data model before you're willing to start solving a problem.

What We’re Looking For

• 5+ years of experience in Product Management, Product Ownership, or a similar product delivery role, ideally within a consultancy, SaaS, or complex enterprise environment.

• Proven experience owning products or major features from discovery through delivery, including requirements, prioritization, backlog management, release planning, and post-launch iteration.

• Strong ability to translate ambiguous business and customer problems into clear product direction, requirements, user stories, acceptance criteria, and actionable engineering work.

• Experience working directly with clients and senior stakeholders, including facilitating discussions, challenging assumptions, managing competing priorities, and driving decisions.

• Demonstrated ability to partner closely with UX/design and engineering teams to shape solutions rather than simply passing requirements between teams.

• Experience working with distributed, cross-time-zone teams. This role regularly collaborates with engineering teams in Poland and clients across U.S. time zones, including the West Coast, so flexibility and strong asynchronous communication are essential.

• Strong understanding of Agile product development, including refinement, sprint planning, dependency management, release coordination, and iterative delivery.

• Ability to use qualitative and quantitative data to evaluate opportunities, prioritize work, define success measures, and assess product outcomes.

• Comfortable navigating technical conversations involving APIs, integrations, data flows, third-party systems, and complex enterprise environments.

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to create clarity across technical and non-technical audiences.

• Highly organized and proactive, with the ability to identify gaps, follow through on commitments, surface risks early, and keep work moving without requiring constant direction.

• Comfortable operating in a consulting environment where priorities can evolve quickly and where Product Managers are expected to bring structure to ambiguity and actively drive outcomes.

• Candidates must currently reside in, or be willing to relocate at their own expense to the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill, NC area prior to their start date.

Nice to Have

• Experience working in a consulting or client-services organization.

• Experience with consumer-facing digital products, mobile applications, loyalty, hospitality, gaming, e-commerce, or similar customer experience platforms.

• Familiarity with tools such as Jira, Miro/Mural, Figma, and product analytics platforms.

• Experience using AI or automation tools as part of product discovery, analysis, requirements development, or delivery workflows.