Overview
You're running a product line inside AirOps that the CEO calls a "startup within a startup." Your day splits between customer calls (understanding what marketing teams need to win in AI search) and hands-on coding (building the features yourself). You own the full stack: customer discovery, product decisions, implementation, and growth metrics.
Role Snapshot
| Aspect | Details |
|---|---|
| Role Type | Technical Product Owner / Growth PM-Engineer Hybrid |
| Product Motion | PLG-assisted with direct customer development |
| Build Complexity | Full-stack growth systems and product features |
| Ownership Scope | End-to-end: discovery, build, ship, measure |
| Team Structure | Direct line to CEO, high autonomy |
| Success Metric | Product adoption and revenue for your product line |
Company Context
Stage: Growth-stage (133 employees, venture-backed)
Size: 133 employees, 15+ former founders on team
Growth: Expanding product lines, building for AI search era
Market Position: Positioning as the standard for brands winning in AI search (Perplexity, ChatGPT, SearchGPT)
Customer Base: Marketing teams, SEO/content teams, agencies
Product Reality
What You're Building: A new product or feature set within AirOps' platform - likely focused on helping brands optimize for AI search engines and LLM citations. The core platform helps teams identify content opportunities, create optimized content, and track performance in AI-powered search.
Your Scope:
- You define the roadmap based on customer feedback
- You write the code (full-stack, likely using AI coding tools like Claude)
- You talk to users to validate direction
- You ship features and measure their impact
- You own the growth metrics for this product line
Tech Environment: You'll be using AI coding assistants ("afternoon sessions in Claude Code" mentioned explicitly). The company builds tools for AI-powered content, so expect modern AI/ML stack, likely cloud-based SaaS architecture.
What You'll Actually Do
Time Breakdown
Customer Calls (30%) | Coding/Building (40%) | Product Strategy (20%) | Internal Sync (10%)
Key Activities
- Customer Development Calls: 2-3 calls per day with existing or prospective users. You're asking what they're struggling with in AI search optimization, what features would move the needle, and validating your roadmap assumptions.
- Feature Development: Writing full-stack code - probably frontend components, backend APIs, data pipelines. Using AI coding tools to move faster. Shipping directly to production.
- Growth Experimentation: Building systems to drive adoption - onboarding flows, activation loops, viral mechanics. You're measured on growth metrics.
- Data Analysis: Looking at usage data, conversion funnels, feature adoption. Making product decisions based on what's actually working.
- Strategic Planning: Weekly or bi-weekly syncs with CEO and leadership on product direction, resourcing needs, and scaling plans.
The Honest Reality
What's Hard
- Constant Context Switching: You're jumping between customer empathy mode and deep technical work multiple times a day. Some people love this, others find it exhausting.
- High Ambiguity: "Startup within a startup" means there's no playbook. You're figuring out what to build, how to position it, and how to sell it - all at once.
- Founder-Level Pressure: You own the success or failure of this product line. If it doesn't grow, that's on you. The CEO is betting on this working.
- Resource Constraints: You're probably not getting a team right away. It's you, your code, and maybe some design/backend support. You need to be comfortable being the only person who can ship.
- Technical Debt Trade-offs: You'll ship things that aren't perfect because speed matters more than polish in the early days. That means coming back to refactor later.
What Success Looks Like
- You ship a feature that drives measurable product adoption (X% increase in DAUs or paid conversions)
- Customers specifically ask for your product by name or feature set
- Revenue attribution to your product line hits meaningful thresholds ($X ARR)
- You build systems that work without your constant intervention (scalable growth loops)
- Other team members want to work on your product because it's clearly winning
Who You're Working With
Internal:
- CEO (Alex Halliday): Direct reporting line. He's technical, founder-minded, and clearly hands-on with this initiative.
- Other Former Founders: 15+ on the team means you're surrounded by people who've built things from scratch. High talent density, high expectations.
- Marketing/Sales Teams: You'll coordinate with go-to-market teams on positioning and customer feedback loops.
External:
- Marketing Directors/VPs: People responsible for organic traffic and brand visibility in AI search.
- SEO/Content Leaders: Practitioners who need tools to adapt to AI-powered search engines.
- Agency Teams: Groups managing content strategy for multiple clients.
What They Care About:
- Winning visibility in AI search results (Perplexity, ChatGPT, SearchGPT citations)
- Concrete data on what content performs in AI contexts
- Tools that reduce manual work while improving outcomes
- Speed - AI search is moving fast and they need to keep up
Requirements
- You've built growth systems or products before - not just managed them, actually wrote code
- Full-stack technical capability (you need to ship features yourself, not just spec them)
- Customer development experience - you're comfortable running discovery calls and extracting product insights
- Comfort with high autonomy and ambiguity - no one is going to tell you exactly what to build
- Track record of shipping - you need to show things you've built and grown
- Founder mentality - you want to own outcomes, not just execute tasks
- Taste in product - you know what good UX looks like and can build it
- AI/LLM familiarity - the product space is AI search optimization, so you need to understand the landscape