Jordan Cooper's Blog: startups, venture capital, etc…

A PM opportunity worth leaving Google for

Posted on November 4, 2013. Filed under: startups, wildcard |

At Wildcard we have the mission of replacing every “webview” on your phone with a native card…or a “wildcard.” We believe that webpages are not the way that people will consume and interact with the information of the internet on mobile…and that this new unit, of the card, will eradicate mobile Safari and Chome as you know them. This is a big mission…and our product is a system with multiple parts. We are building product that touches consumers. We are building product that touches developers in the native ecosystem. And we are building product that touches brands/merchants/publishers (or really anyone that has a presence on the “legacy web”). We have made great progress in defining what a card is and how it behaves. We have made awesome progress in building technology that enables scalable card creation and delivery. And we’ve made tremendous progress in defining user experience and performance innovation such that we can say with deep confidence that interacting with cards is better than interacting with webpages on your phone. With that reality in mind, and with the help of our friends at Twitter, Google, Facebook, etc…brands/merchants/publishers are increasingly aware that investing in a “card strategy” is necessary and important.

In fact, the Brand/Merchant/Publisher side of our business is accelerating to a point that it warrants it’s own leader. This leader is a Product Manager who will own the tools that brands/merchants publishers use to effect their card strategy through Wildcard…as well as the relationships that Wildcard maintains with small and large platforms that host card inventory. This Product Manager almost definitely has a background in Computer Science, but gravitates more toward technical product design and product strategy than programming. S/he is the kind of person that is excited about spending time with established internet companies, listening to their feature needs/requirements. S/he understands how product gets built at companies small and large, and wants to create the most frictionless implementation possible for our brand/merchant/publishers user…Thinking in terms of markup, SDKs, APIs is second nature to this person. Experience in the APM or PM programs at Google or the like is relevant…but on the ground hustle at a company like Stripe, Braintree, or Facebook Platform is equally interesting…This is a more senior role, for someone who is confident in their product ability, confident in their outward facing ability, and experienced enough to build and lead a small team of engineers and/or evangelists as we scale our 3rd party facing products to many corners of the internet.

While this effort is discrete and focussed, the PM of our 3rd party tools will be intimately involved in our consumer facing operations. Wildcard is a system that unites around the core unit of “card.” Decisions around this fundamental unit have implications for 1) our users, 2) our developers, and 3) our brands/merchants/publishers. As such, a key responsibility of the PM is to communicate thinking and learning to team members working on all areas of the system.

If you have the experience and product management training from a top tier program, but are ready to make your mark at a young, well funded, and extremely ambitions New York City startup, this is a unique opportunity to become a leader at Wildcard. You will work with best in class engineers and designers to blow out our 3rd party network and product, and you will come to work every day with wonderful people who care about each other and what we’re attempting to contribute to the world.

Here are a few links on who we are and what we do if this is the first time you’re hearing about Wildcard. I would love to tell you more in person:

What Is Wildcard?

10x Improvement

Team Snapshot (a little out of date, we’ve grown…)

P.S. If you would like to come play with some wildcards…email me and we’ll set up a time for you to visit and demo some cool stuff: jordan.cooper@gmail.com

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