Senior Product Manager, Discourse Graphs

We are looking for a senior product manager to join the Discourse Graphs team, in a fully remote, fixed-term role of 12 to 18 months, paying $110,000 to $195,000 a year depending on where you are based.

Discourse Graphs is an open-source project that helps research teams write down, link and share their questions, claims and evidence, through plugins for Roam Research and Obsidian backed by a shared database. Youll join a small and friendly distributed team of engineers, designers and researchers who are designing, building, and testing new ways of doing collaborative science. We do most of our work in writing, across many time zones, and there are no managers: engineers pull their own work from a queue, and we judge progress by what researchers do with the tools rather than by targets. We are moving from asynchronous toward pair programming, short iterations and regular retrospectives.
We have extensive feedback from internal use as well as two years of user pilots with research labs across North America, more ideas than we can act on, a growing community of labs, and funding to do something with both. Some of the questions we are considering include whether the product stays a set of plugins in Obsidian or needs a standalone app now, how it will live in researchers’ existing tools such as agentic coding interfaces, and when we will extend our use cases to adjacent areas like publication overlays and institutional research roadmapping. Engineers choose their own work from that queue, so we wont ask you to assign tasks, run sprints or act as a Scrum Master.
You are drawn to the problem of how research gets documented, connected and built upon, and youd like to spend a year or more making that easier for working scientists. You are comfortable synthesizing diverse user needs and feedback into a set of high-level priorities and concrete prototypes. Comfort soliciting and navigating user input in context of documented user flows
A way of working alongside designers and engineers rather than handing work to them
Experience working without a manager: noticing what needs doing, taking it on, and keeping others posted in writing
The post is full-time for 12 to 18 months, either as a temporary employee of the Astera Institute or on contract at the same annual rate. It is fixed-term because our funding is, and we will be open about where the funding stands for as long as you are with us. It is fully remote, with some overlap with North American working hours, and you can also work in person at Astera in Emeryville, California. A flexible approach to working hours and remote working
Astera-sponsored health, vision and dental benefits for employees
Onboarding help from peer product teams
We are an equal opportunity employer and are invested in fostering a culture where everyone can thrive. We are committed to equity and inclusion, and we encourage women, people of color, LGBTQIA individuals, people with disabilities, members of ethnic minorities, foreign-born residents, older members of society, and others from minority communities and diverse backgrounds to apply.
Well also ask about your availability, and whether you would prefer employment or a contract. We will start reviewing applications November 2.