Senior Product Manager

Hi, I’m Hilary, Product Director at Unmind.

In this role you’ll be working with me, and the rest of the product team here at Unmind. We’re looking for a product manager to lead our Flow of Work team.

What we do

Unmind is the workplace wellbeing platform on a mission to create mentally healthy workplaces, where everyone can flourish.

We partner with some of the world’s biggest brands like Uber, Major League Baseball, Nationwide, Disney, Sony, and British Airways to give over 2.5 million people the right support at the right time.

We’re unique because we’re actually backed by science (keep in mind less than 2% of wellbeing products are backed by science!). We take a whole organisation approach, giving people at all levels the tools they need to thrive.

The role

The role includes all the normal product management stuff, such as product strategy, discovery, talking to our users, analysing data. It also obviously involves working closely with our great team of engineers (and therefore being comfortable from a technical POV), designers and data analysts to do all of the above and get value in the hands of our users. But here are a few of the things that will help you figure out if this is the right role for you:

• Hands on impact: you have hands-on experience as a Product Manager, having delivered ambitious, impactful products. You should have a "no task too big or too small" attitude towards getting things done and be comfortable being super hands on to get stuff out the door.
• Vision and strategy: product strategy is hard. We expect our Product Managers to have their finger on the pulse of user data, as well as market and technical developments that will empower them to formulate a clear, impactful product vision and strategy to drive towards our company goals.
• Data-informed: we’ve put a lot of work in over the years towards putting data front and centre of our product decision-making. So being not only comfortable looking at data but also enthusiastic about using it to inform your product decisions is vital.
• Product-led: We’re a start up. That means we need to work fast, but intentionally. Having the right mindset is really important to doing this effectively. Our product managers have an experiment-led approach to allow for fast learning and iteration.
• Rigorous but scrappy: Unfortunately, startup life rarely offers the luxury of doing a full multi-month discovery process before developing solutions. We do continuous discovery, so we talk to users regularly, but the focus is on impact, not perfection. We refer to this as our innovate at speed value. I just want to be really clear on this, as it’s not for everyone. Please don’t interpret that as us not caring about design - we absolutely do, we just want to get value to our customers as quickly as we can.
• Delivery: We’re looking for someone who is adept with the all important delivery aspect of product management. This means making sure your team is working at their best and ensuring Flow of Work is accountable towards meeting their OKRs.

And what’s Flow of Work all about?

The Flow of Work team’s aim is to get Unmind users seamlessly engaging with their mental health in the tools they use the most during their working day. The team works towards ensuring users are regularly engaging with the Unmind brand and product because it meets their biopsychosocial needs within the flow of work. This could be anything from Slack, MS Teams and LMSs (learning management systems). There are also tons of cool opportunities to explore around wearables and community platforms. TL;DR: Flow of Work is all about engaging Unmind users outside of the app experience in the ways most meaningful to them. We think it’s a pretty exciting opportunity, so much so that it’s one of our strategic pillars in our product strategy.

The juicy challenges

This is a cool opportunity but it doesn’t come without its challenges. We think these are exciting ones that push us to learn and grow as product people:

We’re a startup, meaning things are fast paced and require a different approach to being a “big company PM”. Here’s a good Lenny’s Newsletter that sets out some of the differences.

I mentioned our innovate at speed value earlier. By no means are we a feature factory. But in startups, we need to move with urgency and focus. This is not to be confused with a sense of emergency (aka chaotically running around and throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks!) It means that we need to have an eye towards learning fast, and pivoting when things aren’t going the way we hoped they would. It also means constantly balancing our employee wellbeing values with innovating at speed. We care deeply about Unminders’ wellbeing. As a wellbeing company it would be worrying if we didn’t! But as a startup, we face the reality that it takes constant work to achieve a healthy balance. We work relentlessly to strike the right balance, but it’s by no means perfect.

In this role, you also need to be comfortable with change. To be clear, we strive to give all our product teams clear direction. It’s unhealthy for priorities to be constantly changing and as Product Director, it’s important to me that we have a robust strategy that gives teams clear direction. But things can change in startups depending on how the market is reacting to the product. Many startups pivot several times before they get things right. So being resilient to change is key.

The last thing to mention is that Unmind is a wellbeing company. It’s a tough nut to crack and we haven’t “won” yet. There is a lot of competition in the sector, and we by no means have it all figured out yet. We, along with our investors, feel confident in our strategy, but it remains that it’s a challenging space to be operating in.

If you’re intrigued all of the above, and can see these as interesting challenges to work with, there are some serious upsides to working with us:

• There is a huge opportunity in B2B mental health: The global corporate wellness market size was valued at USD 53.0 billion in 2022 and is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 4.47% from 2023 to 2030. Many businesses and enterprises in various industry verticals have started implementing health programs for their employees, which will boost the market demand. We are tapping into this demand and getting great market feedback.
• Science: I mentioned earlier that unlike most of the wellbeing solutions out there, we’re built on science. Working at Unmind is a unique opportunity to work alongside our expert team of psychologists. By collaborating with them, and by osmosis, you’ll get a deeper understanding of psychology and science. If psychology is your jam, this is the place for you.
• Working with a truly dedicated group of individuals who care about mental health and are dedicated to our mission. We think we’re quite nice and want to work with other people who are kind and care about others’ wellbeing.

In addition to everything above, here are a few additional reasons to think about how this role can help accelerate your career beyond this role:

• Our flow of work team is a fresh new team with a wide open strategy for you to define. It’s also one of our key strategic priorities as mentioned. You’d be in a brilliant position to have a true impact on Unmind’s trajectory. And let’s be honest, when thinking about your overall product career, it’s important to be able to tell stories of real impact.
• B2B SaaS experience: There are some really cool things happening in this space. B2B Saas has undergone some serious transformation in past years. It has moved away from building a product with only the enterprise buyer in mind, to being customer centric and building for our users. So you’ll be able to flex that user-centric mindset, while gaining experience in SaaS. All the while having a front row seat in a VC-backed startup (and all the knowledge that comes with that around fundraising and scaling a business) See this podcast with Elena Verna, B2B SaaS Product-Led Growth expert to learn more about what’s happening in this space.

The process

If you’re interested, the first stage is to apply with a CV and provide some short answers to the questions in the application form. The things I tend to look for in CVs are:

• Have you got appropriate experience? In this case that probably means you’ve got a couple of different product roles under your belt, e.g. worked on multiple products.
• Is your CV designed so we can extract the appropriate information from it? No more than 2 pages please. I’m not looking for fancy, or anything that stands out, but it is the easiest way for me to assess your product sense as your CV is effectively a product.

The next stage, if you’re successful with your CV and responses, is a video call with me. We can get to know each other a bit. I’ll ask some questions about your experience, and you’ll get to ask any questions you want. Please do think about what you want to know beforehand.

Next will be a time boxed product task. We do this because it’ll be the best way to understand your thought process and approach to solving product problems.

After that, it’ll be on to meet a few of the rest of the team so you can get a feel for who we are.

Care to apply?

This role is advertised as a Senior Product Manager role, but if you have all the traits and mindset we discuss above and don’t have Senior PM in your title, we still want to hear from you. For us, mindset and approach are as important as experience in our selection criteria, so we want to be as flexible as possible on experience range as we can be.

If you want to know more about Unmind team and our values, you can take a look here.

If all of this sounds interesting to you, and you fit the bill, we’d love to hear from you.

A big thanks to Lucy Spence for inspiring how I wrote this JD!