Engineering Manager, Self-Serve

WHY WE’RE LOOKING FOR YOU:

We’re looking for an Engineering leader to take full ownership of a critical piece of Retool’s strategy: our self-serve product experience. Retool’s self-serve product allows us to tap into customers beyond the reach of a traditional sales motion—think small business or a three-person startup. Just like larger organizations or enterprises, these companies run on custom internal software, spreadsheets, and manual processes. And Retool provides them so much leverage, enabling the tools they need to solve each unique business problem more effectively. Our self-serve product is also a huge part of our Enterprise story, acting as an on-ramp for customers who want to kick the tires on the product with just a few use cases or users. We've seen some of our largest customers begin their journey trying Retool’s cloud product before directly engaging with our Sales team—and it's on this team to impress them from their very first moments building.

We’ve already got a team of excellent engineers in this space, working on things like:

• A completely redesigned onboarding experience, that needs to constantly adapt to new features in the core product

• Various experiments to drive adoption of features or ways of application building,  making it easier to grok the core concepts of Retool so customers can quickly get up and running (e.g., quick “do it for you” actions within our application builder and  in-product documentation)
• Collaborating with our Product and Business Operations teams to make the right decisions for our customers and business, helping to shape our overall monetization strategy for self-serve
• Partnering with our marketing team on various programs for startups
• Experimenting with bigger ideas to bring the product closer to retool.com, including playgrounds/sandboxes, etc.
• …and so much more!

At Retool, we expect a lot from our engineers: breaking down projects, making product decisions, and maintaining a relentless focus on shipping impactful work—and your primary responsibility will be in empowering, coaching, and rewarding your teams to do their best work. Day one on the job will see you managing the existing team and hiring alongside recruiting partners to tackle business needs in tandem. You’ll also step into shaping key business and product decisions for Retool, where the line between PM and EM is intentionally blurred. We'll expect you to prioritize requests, talk to customers, keep the energy and tempo up, and partner with ICs making technical decisions. But one thing is squarely your responsibility: people. 

This isn’t your traditional 'growth' engineering team focused on making incremental changes or relying primarily on experiment results to inform decisions. Yes, you will drive our experimentation culture here, but you’ll also be expected to leverage your product taste every step of the way to figure out how to show the power of Retool in just a few minutes tinkering with the product. And your ownership extends far beyond just onboarding. This is foundational work, dedicated to the entire new user experience —from when a customer onboards to when they deploy their first application.

IN THIS ROLE, YOU WILL:

• Manage and coach a fullstack team of engineers; support the team by identifying growth opportunities, providing continuous feedback, and performance management as needed. 
• Define your team ownership and boundaries to most effectively achieve outcomes for the business. You’ll work with the broader EM team to make sure your team is always positioned and staffed to do its best work.
• Collaborate with product managers and product designers. We don’t do many “handoffs”—we expect you to build a deep partnership with your peers that is collaborative from idea to shipping to following up with customers.
• Meet directly with our customers to better understand their needs, and partner deeply with our data teams.

• Introduce scalable, repeatable processes that help engineering and product teams deliver a successful product.
• Partner closely with recruiting to strategically scale your team, prioritizing the hiring of a diverse and driven group of engineers.

THE SKILLSET YOU'LL BRING: 

• 2+ years of experience successfully leading and managing product engineering teams; teams that ship rapidly and embrace experimentation is a huge plus (think: Growth or New User Experience teams) 
• Strong product sense, and the ability to take input and drive to decisions quickly.
• While you're not expected to write code daily, your strong technical skills enable you to navigate our codebase and engage deeply on design and architecture.
• Ability to manage stakeholders, communicate in a structured manner, and drive maximal accountability.
• Successfully recruit, build, and scale teams: we expect our engineering managers to roll up their sleeves, whether it's jumping in to help with sourcing, crafting a job description like this one (hello from a fellow EM!), or selling candidates, it's on you to build your team.
• Ability to operate as a business-owner, prioritizing business needs first-and-foremost, and making sure your teams deeply understand the business context in which they operate.

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Last updated on Aug 27, 2024