Product Manager (Entry –Mid Senior Level) 

Location : Sunnyvale/SFO/Remote 

Company Overview 

Appen is the leading provider of Data for AI lifecycle. Appen’s products are used to build and continually improve the world’s most innovative artificial intelligence systems. Appen has three core suites of products (Data Sourcing, Data Preparation, and Model Evaluation by Human) that cover images, text, speech, audio, video, and other data modalities. 

Growth Strategy 

High-quality training data necessarily includes human beings, to record and transcribe speech for example or recognize complex images. Appen uses a crowdsourced model to engage humans at scale, but this increases the cost, time, and complexity of providing data sets. The company relies on technology to accelerate and reduce the cost of training data. It has developed and acquired platform that manages and enables crowd workers. 

Appen’s growth strategy is built on four pillars: 

• Grow in New Markets: Drive growth in target customer segments China, Government, Enterprise, and Global Product


• Automate our annotation services: Leverage AI/ML in our labelling operations to improve the productivity and quality of our workforce


• Expand our product offering: Add new products and capabilities to expand into the broader data and AI market


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

We are looking for product managers at all levels to drive strategic decision-making relating to new product initiatives. In this role you will propose new product initiatives, recommendations, and winning strategies to the leadership team to justify your business cases and gain their buy-in. The responsibility includes a new business plan and proposal, roadmap definition, product execution, GTM strategy, and product launch. 

Key Responsibilities 

1. Feature Specification: Gather requirements, define functionality via PRDs/MRDs, and set goals in a clear, actionable format for product team and drive product delivery.


2. Product Delivery: Collaborate with stakeholders engineering and design to deliver product functionality iteratively and rapidly against pre-defined goals.


3. Product QA: Identify, prioritize, and resolve technical, functional, and business quality issues across use cases. that are applicable to the product.


4. Data Fluency: Generate actionable insights using data and leverage these insights to achieve goals set for the product, and to connect them with goals to meaningful business outcomes.


5. Voice of the customer: Gather customer feedback (from all forms) to understand how Appen customers engage with the product, make better decisions, and drive meaningful outcomes for the business


6. Stakeholder Management: Collaborate and align with cross-functional stakeholders, and senior leaders and executives in the respective product areas to ensure successful delivery of PRDs/MRDs.


7. Product Ownership: Connect product functionality and goals to strategic objectives of the team and Appen.

Required Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities 

• Knowledge and passion for technical and platform product management experiences


• Excellent customer-facing written and verbal communication and presentation to stakeholders and executives


• Excellent organizational and collaboration skills, particularly the ability to handle multiple priorities, stakeholders and workstreams


• Experience with integrating customer feedback into product requirements, and driving prioritization


• Ability to influence cross-functional teams without authority (e.g. Engineering, UX/UI, Program Management, Marketing, Customer Success, and Technical Writers)
   

Qualifications And Experience 

• Bachelors / Master's degree in technical or business-related area


• 2+ years of product management experience


• Experience in driving elements of product development life cycle from vision to execution (i.e., product vision, GTM strategy, driving requirements and product launch)


• 3+ years as software developer or having developers as customers unlocking product experiences using technology.


• Experience working on large scale platforms to drive growth, retention, and engagement initiatives for cloud/enterprise and/or developer areas.
   

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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