Product Manager

About CEA

The Centre for Effective Altruism’s mission is to build and nurture a global community of people who are thinking carefully about the world’s biggest problems and taking impactful action to solve them.
To foster this community, we run conferences, support hundreds of local groups, and provide online resources and forums for discussion.

About this role

CEA is looking for a product manager to lead the development of the EA Forum.

Vision

This forum has undergone huge growth recently:
forum growth
This growth is exciting, but also brings new problems. We are no longer in a world where even the most dedicated EA's can keep up with everything that's written, and the large influx of new people will stretch our ability to create and share common knowledge. EA seems poised to influence the next generation of thinkers and leaders, and this site is a major way people involved with the movement communicate with each other, from top journalists to CEOs of billion-dollar companies.
The EA Forum team is considering:
  1. Introducing Reddit-style federated sub-forums, to better direct people to the content they find useful
  2. Diving deep into key user journeys, to understand where people bounce and how we can prevent that. For instance, trying to better understand the experience of a newcomer who gets sent a post by their group organizer for the first time.
  3. Improving recommendations and personalization such that newcomers don't bounce from confusion but old-timers don't bounce from boredom
This work requires both product management expertise and a deep understanding of the EA community. The intended role will be the 'product owner', prioritizing projects (like those listed above) and executing on them.
The CEA Online team grew from three people last year, to 10 as of this writing, and is expected to be around 15 by the end of the year.
If you want to join a rapidly growing team of engineers, designers, and content creators, working on a product that users love, that has a big positive impact on the world, then we would love to hear from you.

Responsibilities

Fundamentally, your job is to design and expand upon our theory of change and create a product which successfully executes on that theory. We expect this to involve:
  • Talking to our target audience to understand what they’re looking for when they visit the site, and how we can better serve them.
  • Designing/expanding upon our theory of change to make our products even more impactful.
  • Rapidly building and testing prototypes.
  • Defining and tracking metrics to understand and improve our progress.
  • Working with engineers, designers, and content creators to create a compelling user experience.

Skills

We think there are three sorts of people who could succeed in this role:
High EA context, limited formal PM experience
  • You have deep engagement with EA, ideally but not necessarily through the Forum, and already have at least weakly held opinions about how the EA community could be more impactful, and potentially how online products could improve that
  • You are organized and a clear communicator
  • You are eager and able to learn a PM skill set
Limited EA context, successful track record as a PM
  • You have a successful track record as the manager/owner of digital products
  • You are familiar with EA and can speak about your cause prioritization, and are interested in an impact-oriented career
  • You fit with CEA’s epistemic practices: you can identify cruxes and disagreements and update based on evidence and feel comfortable with quantitative reasoning
  • You are willing and able to get up to speed with EA such that you could create a compelling theory of change for the Forum within a few months of joining
High EA context, successful track record as a PM
(Our ideal candidate – fitting both previous descriptions - but we’re guessing that the candidate we end up hiring will look like one of the two previous descriptions.)

Your coworkers

You will report to Ben West, and work in the Online team. You may also work with the Lightcone/LessWrong team, as the EA Forum shares a codebase with LessWrong. Online team fancy The Online team

Salary, benefits, and location

This is a full-time remote role. We prefer applicants who are able to work in time zones between US Pacific Time and GMT. We require that applicants be available 5-7 PM GMT, Monday through Friday. Salary for candidates in Oxford is £67,500-£98,200 depending on experience, with some flexibility above this range for an exceptional candidate. Salaries for candidates who prefer to work remotely will be decided based on location and skills. (As a rough calibration point, the salary range for San Francisco is $131,000-192,200, with flexibility for exceptional candidates.) UK benefits include health, dental, and vision insurance, flexible work hours, a £1,000 annual training budget, extended parental leave, ergonomic equipment, a 3% pension contribution, and 25 days of paid vacation. We have similar benefits in the US. CEA serves a global community, and our team works with people and organizations all over the world. We are committed to fostering a culture of inclusion, and we encourage individuals with diverse backgrounds and experiences to apply. We are an equal opportunity employer. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, or have any other questions about applying, please contact caitlin@centreforeffectivealtruism.org.
This position is now closed.
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