Overview
You'll work on FundMiner's fund management platform that helps nonprofits, universities, and foundations track restricted donor funds. Day-to-day, you're gathering requirements from customers and internal teams, writing specs for engineering, and helping prioritize what features get built. You'll split time between customer calls to understand pain points, internal planning meetings, and writing documentation.
Role Snapshot
| Aspect | Details |
|---|---|
| Role Type | Associate Product Manager (IC contributor, reporting to founders) |
| Sales Motion | Not a sales role - product development |
| Deal Complexity | N/A |
| Sales Cycle | N/A |
| Deal Size | N/A |
| Quota (est.) | N/A - measured on product delivery and feature adoption |
Company Context
Stage: Seed ($4.35M raised, most recent $2.5M in July 2024)
Size: 31 employees
Growth: Recent Blackbaud partnership announced, won marketplace growth award. Hiring for both product and customer-facing roles suggests expansion phase.
Market Position: Niche player in nonprofit fund management. Competing against manual processes (Excel), generic CRMs, and established players like Affinaquest. Not a crowded space but also not a huge TAM.
Product Reality
What You're Building: Software that aggregates financial data, donor records, and operational info so nonprofits can track restricted funds (money that can only be used for specific purposes). Think: a scholarship fund that can only pay for student aid, or a donation earmarked for a specific research project.
Integration Complexity: You're pulling data from finance systems, CRMs (often Blackbaud products), and potentially homegrown databases. Most customers have messy, legacy data.
Customer Profile: Development directors, grant managers, finance teams at universities, hospitals, foundations. Not super technical users. They care about compliance, accurate reporting, and not manually reconciling spreadsheets.
What You'll Actually Do
Time Breakdown
Customer Research (30%) | Planning/Specs (30%) | Eng Collaboration (25%) | Admin/Meetings (15%)
Key Activities
- Customer Calls: Join CSM calls or schedule your own to hear how customers are using the product, what's clunky, what features they're asking for. Lots of note-taking and trying to find patterns across different organizations.
- Writing Requirements: Translate vague requests ("we need better reporting") into specific user stories and acceptance criteria. Document edge cases. Make decisions about what's in scope.
- Engineering Standups: Daily or weekly syncs with dev team. Answer questions about requirements, discuss technical constraints, prioritize bugs vs features.
- Roadmap Planning: Work with founders to decide what gets built in the next sprint or quarter. Often involves hard tradeoffs between customer requests, technical debt, and strategic bets.
- Feature Testing: Click through prototypes and staging environments. Write up bugs. Make sure what gets shipped actually solves the problem you scoped.
The Honest Reality
What's Hard
- Ambiguity: At 31 people, product processes are still being defined. You won't have a senior PM to shadow or a playbook to follow. You figure things out as you go.
- Competing Priorities: Every customer wants their feature first. Sales wants features to close deals. Engineering wants to fix technical debt. You're often the person who has to say "not now" and defend why.
- Domain Learning Curve: Fund accounting and nonprofit compliance rules are dry and complex. You'll spend weeks just understanding how restricted funds work and why gift documentation matters.
- Customer Availability: Your users are busy fundraising. Getting feedback can be slow. When you do get time with them, they may not articulate problems clearly.
- Scope Creep: Early-stage companies often promise custom features to land deals. You inherit those commitments and have to figure out how to deliver without derailing the roadmap.
What Success Looks Like
- Features you ship actually get adopted by customers (not built and ignored)
- Engineering respects your specs and doesn't come back with constant clarifying questions
- Customer churn decreases because the product better fits their workflows
- You identify a high-impact feature that multiple customers need and successfully get it prioritized and built
Who You're Working With
Internal Stakeholders:
- Founders (Alejandro & Chelsea): You're reporting to them. They have final say on roadmap and vision.
- Engineering Team: Small team, so you're probably working with 3-6 developers. Expect to answer a lot of implementation questions.
- Customer Success: They're your primary source of customer feedback and the ones who hear complaints about missing features.
- Sales: They'll ask for features to help close deals. You'll need to vet whether those are one-off requests or broadly applicable.
Customers:
- Development Directors at universities (managing scholarship funds, endowments)
- Grant managers at foundations (tracking restricted grants)
- Finance teams at hospitals or nonprofits (reconciling donor-restricted accounts)
They care about: staying compliant with donor restrictions, producing accurate reports for boards or auditors, saving time vs manual processes.
Requirements
- 1-2 years in product, ops, or customer-facing roles (they're calling this "Associate" so not expecting senior PM experience)
- Ability to talk to non-technical users and translate needs into clear specs
- Comfortable with ambiguity and building process from scratch
- Bonus: experience with B2B SaaS, nonprofit/education sector, or financial software
- Willingness to learn fund accounting and compliance rules (or prior exposure)
- Remote work habits - you're not in an office with the team