Product Manager – Content Relevance 

Summary 

High-quality training data necessarily requires human beings to record and transcribe speech, for example, or recognize the contents of complex images. Appen uses a crowdsourced model to engage humans at scale, while providing customers a framework to manage the cost, time, and complexity in producing human-annotated data sets. Appen relies on technology to accelerate and reduce the cost of humans preparing training data. It invests continuously in its crowd management and customer service platforms, leveraging its own in-house-developed machine-learning models as needed. 

Appen’s strategy is built on four pillars: 

• Growth:  Drive revenue growth in target new markets  
• Automation:  Leverage AI and ML in labelling operations to improve the productivity and quality of customer outcomes 
• Expand:  Add new products and capabilities to expand into the broader data and AI market 

• Evolve:  Improve the scalability of our operations including sales, project delivery, and crowd management 

Appen is continuing to invest in its Data for AI platform, facilitating data sourcing, preparation, annotation, and automated testing of models to bring the benefits of AI accessible to a broad range of products and services being developed by our customer in many industry verticals.  Although Appen is a 25-year-old profitable company with considerable resources being invested in all areas, Appen matches the pace and innovative spirit of a startup company that offers flexible work-life balance options. 

The Position 

We are looking for an experienced, driven product manager with B2B SaaS experience  

to drive cross-functional product initiatives that enable Appen customers to up-level their ability to deliver products and services that are based on trainable AI machine models for content in many forms (e.g., textual, image, video, audio) and enable a range of applications and services, such as search engines, inappropriate content filtering, ad serving, recommendation systems, promotion/offer optimization, and content classification. 

In this role, you will work across engineering, data science, user experience, managed services, crowd management, sales, partnership and marketing teams to develop market analysis reports, GTM recommendations, advanced prototypes, shipping platform features, production tooling, partner integrations and a deep understanding of customer and end-consumer needs. You will own the content relevance product vertical that is empowered by a world-class Data for AI software platform.  You will cultivate and optimize the content relevance “book of business” and enable ever-improving delivery standards in Appen Managed Services for content relevance.   

Responsibilities  

Your responsibilities will demand excellent communication and collaboration skills, data-driven decision making, and continuous evaluation of new opportunities: 

• Conduct domain research and competitive analysis to identify new initiatives  
• Propose new business cases to executive management and obtain buy-in 

• Own the roadmap for content relevance, spanning across data collection, cleaning, annotation, and model evaluation 
• Work closely with key customers and partners to solicit, validate, and generate product refinements 
• Collaborate with Marketing on content to promote Appen’s content relevance business models  
• Work closely with Customer Success and Sales teams to evolve roadmap priorities to maximize revenue growth 
• Build reporting models for tracking data quality trends, both within Appen’s platform and for internal decision support 

  Qualifications: 

• BA/BS degree, with 5+ years of experience in product management in the SaaS enterprise software space 
• Prior experience in quality assurance/management frameworks 
• Experience with metric definition, quantifying problems, and managing their impact over time 

• Experience using data-driven analytics to gain insights on current situations, new opportunities, and product performance 
• Experience working directly with customer stakeholders to formulate strategies to improve customer satisfaction, automation rates and ease of use 

About Appen

Appen is a global leader in the development of high-quality, human-annotated datasets for machine learning and artificial intelligence. Appen brings over 20 years of experience capturing and enriching a wide variety of data types including speech, text, image and video. With deep expertise in more than 180 languages and access to a global crowd of over 1 million skilled contractors, Appen partners with technology, automotive and eCommerce companies — as well as governments worldwide — to help them develop, enhance and use products that rely on natural languages and machine learning.

At Appen, we value performance, honesty, humility, and grit. We persevere and remain focused, whilst maintaining agility to achieve quality outcomes and exceed expectations. We’re truth tellers – respectfully of course. We take accountability for our actions and believe in giving and receiving direct feedback. We give credit where credit is due and show gratitude to others for their contributions. We seek diverse perspectives as we recognize the value in teamwork and collaboration. Through grit, we take ownership, and we don’t give up.

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

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