Senior Product Manager - Core

Sr Product Manager - Core

Location:

Hybrid/Oakland CA
👋Hello, we’re Instrumentl. We’re a mission-driven startup helping the nonprofit sector to drive impact, and we’re well on our way to becoming the #1 most-loved grant discovery and management tool.

To help us get there, we’re hiring a Senior Product Manager - Core
, who will play a key role in defining and executing on the next phase of Instrumentl’s growth.

Instrumentl is a hypergrowth YC-backed startup with over 5,000 nonprofit clients, from local homeless shelters to larger organizations like the San Diego Zoo and the University of Alaska. We are building the future of fundraising automation, helping nonprofits to discover, track, and manage grants efficiently through our SaaS platform.

Our charts are dramatically up-and-to-the-right 📈 — we’re cash flow positive and doubling year-over-year, with customers who love us (NPS is 65+ and Ellis PMF survey is 60+). Join us on this rocket ship!

We’re looking for a Senior Product Manager - Core
, who combines 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.

• Customer Insight, Domain Fluency & Problem Discovery: Develop a deep understanding of nonprofit realities, including funding volatility, staff burnout, compliance constraints, and multi-persona workflows. Internalize the differences between small nonprofits where people “wear many hats” and larger, more matrixed organizations. Start from problems, not features: clearly articulate user and business pain, distinguish root causes from symptoms, and frame opportunities effectively. Synthesize insights from usage data, customer conversations, internal documents, and competitive research into clear, actionable problem statements.
• Product Strategy, Sequencing & Delivery Judgment: Build a coherent strategic narrative that connects market context → customer problems → product themes → roadmap. Cluster initiatives into outcome-driven themes rather than isolated features. Sequence work thoughtfully, delivering thin-sliced early versions (MVPs / MLPs) to reduce risk and accelerate learning. Make strong tradeoffs by balancing customer value, engineering effort, and business priorities.
• AI Product Thinking: Evaluate when AI is genuinely additive versus when rules-based logic, scoring, or analytics are sufficient. Design human-in-the-loop workflows for high-stakes use cases such as grant applications, reviews, and approvals. Build trust by separating authoring and reviewing, and avoiding patterns where AI “grades its own work.” Clearly articulate data and model needs, edge cases, and failure modes (e.g., conditional logic, nested questions).
• Measurement & Outcomes Orientation: Define and align on a clear product North Star (e.g., multi-workflow adoption). Pair features with both leading and lagging indicators, such as usage, completion rates, win rates, retention, and NRR. For AI-driven features, define what “good” looks like through evaluations and qualitative signals—not just logs and dashboards. Run post-launch reviews to assess impact and guide iteration.
• Communication, Storytelling & Cross-Functional Leadership: Communicate clearly and structurally, making complex ideas understandable to both technical and non-technical audiences. Craft narratives that connect customer problems to product decisions and business outcomes. Lead through influence by treating product as a team sport—partnering early with Design, Engineering, Customer Success, and GTM. Navigate disagreements productively and ensure features are built…