Senior Product Manager

About the Role

Synapse Studios is a product engineering studio that partners with companies to design, build, and scale high-quality software. We are hiring a Senior Product Manager to own the client engagement end to end. You are the product strategist on your accounts, leading product strategy alongside our delivery and design leads across a wide variety of custom software applications.

This is hands-on product strategy. You own the product direction: you run continuous discovery, do the market and user research, own the product roadmap, shape go-to-market with the client, and make the calls about what is worth building next. Every engagement pairs you with a delivery lead who owns execution and a design lead who owns the experience, so you lead the product with two experienced partners at the table.

The strategy work itself varies a lot. Some engagements start at zero: product vision, market and competitive analysis, opportunity sizing, and deciding what is worth building at all. Others are large-scale legacy modernization, where the strategy question is how to move a critical system forward without breaking the business that runs on it. You will see both, often within the same year, working with genuinely innovative clients and companies. Few in-house roles let you sharpen this wide a range of product strategy skills this quickly.

You will own several client engagements at a time, working directly with client stakeholders and with the team building their product. We staff those deliberately: carrying a few products at once is part of the job here, and keeping teams focused instead of overloaded is how we protect the quality of the work. These engagements run long. You are there for discovery, for launch, and for the growth and scale that follow, working toward goal-based milestones you help define with the client. Because you are senior, you will often get the engagements that are the least defined at the start. Our work varies from traditional product development to AI-enabled workflows, so you will build range across both whatever depth of AI experience you bring.

We scope, ship, and deliver on time and on budget, and holding that line is part of the product job here. You help scope the work up front, then manage the resources and the budget you have against the outcomes you and the client committed to, making the tradeoff calls with real numbers in front of you.

You will run your work through our proprietary AI platform tooling and agentic workflows, which we build and use in our own operations. Agents carry the research sweeps, synthesis, document drafting, and reporting, which means the work products you hand a client get sharper, deeper, and more valuable as the engagement goes on. Raising that bar is the point, and you will help set how far we can push it.

Around that platform you get a comprehensive generative AI toolchain, Claude included. Our Anthropic Partner Network status gives the team early, deep access to frontier models and the tooling built around them, so how you work here keeps moving forward. We are looking for a senior PM who is genuinely excited to work this way, grounded in real product fundamentals: this tooling amplifies product managers who already know how to define and ship the right thing.

This role reports to the Director of Product and is a strong fit for an experienced product manager who wants more ownership, more client exposure, and more variety than a single in-house product can offer. As a senior member of the product team, you will also help shape how we practice product here, mentoring less experienced PMs and improving the playbook the whole studio works from.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the Client Engagement:
  • Serve as the primary day-to-day product contact for your client engagements, from discovery through launch and the growth that follows
  • Run continuous discovery with client stakeholders and end users, treating it as an ongoing habit rather than a phase, and turn ambiguous requests into clear, scoped, buildable work
  • Do the strategy work each engagement actually calls for, whether that is product vision and market analysis at the zero stage or a modernization path for a system the client's business depends on
  • Own outcomes-driven product roadmaps that carry a product past launch and toward the client's growth goals
  • Shape go-to-market with the client: positioning, launch planning, early adoption, and what the product needs in order to land
  • Define and track the goal-based milestones that measure whether the engagement is producing real outcomes for the client
  • Scope the work with the client and the delivery lead, and set commitments the team can ship on time and on budget
  • Manage the resources and budget on your engagements, steering both toward the outcomes the client is paying for
  • Watch burn against remaining scope, and re-plan early when the numbers say the plan needs to change
  • Communicate status, tradeoffs, risks, and decisions clearly and early, including the news clients would rather not hear
  • Run demos, walkthroughs, and working sessions that keep stakeholders aligned and engaged, up to and including executive sponsors
• Lead the Product With Delivery and Design:
  • Set product direction and priority, and give the delivery lead and design lead the context and decisions they need to run execution and experience with confidence
  • Write clear user stories, acceptance criteria, and requirements that the team can act on without guesswork
  • Partner with the design lead on research, concepts, and the experience direction
  • Partner with the delivery lead on sequencing, capacity, and risk, and make the product tradeoff calls when something has to give
  • Define what done means, and stay close to the work as it ships so what gets built is what the client actually needs
• Work AI-First:
  • Run your daily work through our proprietary AI platform and agentic workflows: market and user research, discovery synthesis, requirements drafting, prototyping, and client reporting
  • Build and refine agentic workflows for your own product work, and turn the ones that pay off into repeatable operations the rest of the studio can run
  • Put that leverage into the work product itself: deeper analysis, tighter artifacts, and more value delivered per engagement over time
  • Build lightweight prototypes to pressure-test ideas before engineering invests real time
  • Bring practical judgment about where AI genuinely helps a client and where it does not
  • Share what works back to the rest of the product team so the whole studio gets better at this
• Raise the Bar:
  • Mentor and coach less experienced product managers, through feedback, pairing, and reviewing their work
  • Provide product leadership inside the studio, improving how we practice product: our continuous discovery approach, roadmap standards, and working artifacts
  • Take on the engagements that are hardest to scope, and set the pattern others can follow
  • Partner with leadership on scoping and estimating new work, and help set engagements up to succeed before they start

Qualifications

• 5+ years of product management experience, owning product strategy for software built by a dedicated team
• A track record of owning ambiguous, high-stakes work end to end with limited direction
• The organizational habits to carry several products at once and keep each one moving, with context switching you manage well
• Experience scoping work and managing to a budget, with a track record of delivering on time and on budget
• Experience working directly with clients, customers, or external stakeholders, and comfort owning that relationship day to day
• Strong written communication and structured thinking: you can turn a messy conversation into a clear, scoped plan
• Real product strategy range: product vision, market and competitive analysis, opportunity assessment, product roadmaps, and go-to-market
• A continuous discovery practice: you stay in contact with users and stakeholders through the life of a product, not only at kickoff
• Comfort in an agile environment, contributing stories, acceptance criteria, and priority alongside a delivery lead and a design lead
• Technical fluency to hold a credible conversation with engineers about tradeoffs, constraints, and sequencing
• Genuine AI fluency: you actively use generative AI and agentic workflows in your own work and have a real point of view on where they create value
• Experience owning a product beyond launch, through iteration, growth, and scale
• Experience mentoring or coaching other product managers, formally or informally
• Comfort operating with evolving requirements and limited upfront specification

Strong Differentiators

These make you stronger here, and none of them are requirements:

• You enjoy the consulting, client service, or agency model, or you have worked in one and carried more than one client at a time. Experience there helps, and we hire people coming straight from in-house product roles too
• 0→1 product experience: you've built something from scratch and driven it to adoption
• Experience with AI-enabled product work, prompt-based tools, or no-code automation
• Experience helping scope or shape new engagements, including estimation and statements of work
• Background in a regulated or operationally complex domain such as healthcare, fintech, or logistics
• Genuine curiosity about emerging technology

About Synapse Studios

We work closely with our clients to solve complex problems, often in ambiguous environments, and we invest heavily in our own internal platforms and tools that reflect how we believe modern software should be built. We have helped more than 80 companies launch over 100 products to market.

Almost all of our work is long-term product partnership rather than one-off project work. We stay with a product through discovery, launch, and the growth and scale that follow, measured against goal-based milestones we set together with the client. That is why this role is about owning a relationship, not shipping a deliverable and moving on.

Our culture is grounded in ownership, autonomy, and continuous delivery. We favor clear thinking over ceremony, judgment over checklists, and steady progress over perfect plans. If something is unclear, we talk about it. If something breaks, we fix it. If something can be improved, we improve it.

A Final Note

We know great product managers don't always check every box, and we are not looking for perfection. We are looking for someone who cares about the craft, takes ownership of their work, and wants to keep getting better.

If you like being close to the work, close to the client, and close to the team actually building it, let's talk!