Senior Product Manager - Core

About the role

We’re looking for a Senior Product Manager - Core to report to our Co-founder and Head of EPD, who will combine deep customer empathy, strong product judgment, and pragmatic AI thinking. This role is ideal for someone who starts from real customer problems (not features), can build and sequence a thoughtful roadmap, and knows how to ship incrementally while maintaining high standards for trust, outcomes, and cross-functional alignment.

You will own problem discovery, product strategy, and delivery for core workflows used by nonprofit organizations—often in high-stakes, high-context environments like grant discovery and applications. You’ll work closely with Design, Engineering, Customer Success, and GTM partners to ensure what we build is useful, adoptable, and measurable.

The Instrumentl team is fully distributed, with offices in Oakland, CA. For this position, we're planning for a hybrid schedule - you'll be able to work from home four days per week, and from our Oakland offices once per week (or more often, if you'd like)!

What you will do

Discovery & Strategy

• Develop deep understanding of nonprofit realities: funding volatility, staff burnout, compliance constraints, and multi-persona workflows
• Start from problems, not features: clearly articulate user and business pain, distinguish root causes from symptoms, and frame opportunities effectively
• Build a coherent strategic narrative connecting market context to customer problems to roadmap
• Sequence work thoughtfully, delivering thin-sliced early versions to reduce risk and accelerate learning

AI Product Thinking

• Evaluate when AI is genuinely additive versus when rules-based logic or analytics are sufficient
• Design human-in-the-loop workflows for high-stakes use cases like grant applications, reviews, and approvals
• Clearly articulate data and model needs, edge cases, and failure modes

Measurement & Cross-functional Leadership

• Define and align on a clear product North Star and pair features with both leading and lagging indicators
• Lead through influence: partner early with Design, Engineering, CS, and GTM and navigate disagreements productively
• Run post-launch reviews to assess impact and guide iteration

What we are looking for

Required

• 5+ years of product management experience in SaaS (B2B preferred)
• Demonstrated experience owning problem discovery, strategy, and execution end-to-end
• Strong judgment in sequencing work and shipping incrementally
• Experience building or working with AI-powered features in real production environments
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills
• Startup-tested: thrives with ambiguity, builds process without waiting for permission, and knows when to move fast versus when to be methodical

Nice to Have

• Experience with nonprofit, mission-driven, or compliance-heavy product domains
• Background in grant management, fund accounting, or financial workflows