Job Description
Product Manager – Magic Firewall
Austin or Remote US
About Us
At Cloudflare, we have our eyes set on an ambitious goal: to help build a better Internet. Today the company runs one of the world’s largest networks that powers approximately 25 million Internet properties, for customers ranging from individual bloggers to SMBs to Fortune 500 companies. Cloudflare protects and accelerates any Internet application online without adding hardware, installing software, or changing a line of code. Internet properties powered by Cloudflare all have web traffic routed through its intelligent global network, which gets smarter with every request. As a result, they see significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks. Cloudflare was named to Entrepreneur Magazine’s Top Company Cultures list and ranked among the World’s Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company.
We realize people do not fit into neat boxes. We are looking for curious and empathetic individuals who are committed to developing themselves and learning new skills, and we are ready to help you do that. We cannot complete our mission without building a diverse and inclusive team. We hire the best people based on an evaluation of their potential and support them throughout their time at Cloudflare. Come join us!
About the Department
As a Product Manager at Cloudflare, you are responsible for building products that improve the way that the Internet works. Product Managers at Cloudflare sit at the intersection of software development, design, and business strategy. We shape high-level product goals but also get our hands dirty. On an average day, you might pitch a concept to senior leadership, create a launch plan with marketing, work with designers to conduct user research, prototype a new feature, iterate on a spec, analyze usage data, and pair with an engineer on implementation. We have ultimate responsibility for understanding our client needs, influencing business strategy, feature specification, and working with engineering to develop our software.
About the Role
We are hiring a PM to help build products that enable customers to transform their corporate network.
Cloudflare provides a full stack of networking-as-a-service products that allow customers to build and operate secure, reliable, and fast networks without purchasing traditional network hardware. Cloudflare’s network underpins mission-critical infrastructure, always-on applications, small businesses, and everything in between. Our customers rely on the performance, security, reliability, and visibility provided by our network to power their business.
We’re looking for a PM to define and execute on the vision to replace next generation network firewalls with a modern, network-as-a-service offering leveraging the full power and threat data of the Cloudflare network. Traditional network firewalls, and their virtualized equivalents, all suffer from the same scale, cost, and administration challenges of other network hardware that Cloudflare replaces. It’s time to build a better solution and reinvent the market.
As Product Manager for Magic Firewall, your job will be to:
- Ensure customers are able to easily analyze and secure network traffic to and from any network locationwhether on the Internet or across the corporate environment.
- Build innovative solutions to customers’ network security problems that leverage the unique strengths of Cloudflare: a massive, highly interconnected network spanning the world, threat intelligence distilled from an unparalleled vantage point on the Internet, and a high-velocity engineering organization that ships early and often.
- Harness cutting edge machine learning (ML) and big data analysis techniques to build solutions that detect and mitigate network security threats with minimal customer involvement.
- Think through how to make a great, easy-to-use product that customers love, and drive the full product life cycle from core user needs discovery through to pricing and packaging. Ship continuous software and process improvements to support your products’ sustained growth.
What You’ll Do
As a member of the growing team of product managers your responsibilities include:
- Own the product vision for your area. Ensure that it aligns with the overall product and company vision.
- Represent the customer. Be the champion and voice of customers. Build intimate, personal customer relationships. Bring the customer’s voice into the creation process.
- Manage the roadmap. Make tough tactical prioritization decisions while helping the company think long-term. Build trust with stakeholders by maintaining an understandable, accurate roadmap.
- Author use cases and prioritize requirements. Translate market observations and customer feedback into a prioritized product backlog. Author use cases based on specific real-world product applications and extrapolate detailed product requirements for the scenarios.
- Collaborate across teams. We win or lose as a team. Product managers play a critical role in creating alignment between engineering teams and other stakeholders. A collaborative attitude is essential to the job.
- Measure success. Own the measures used to define success for your product. Success measures must be defined at the inception of a product and tracked throughout its lifecycle. Make measures visible to all stakeholders and interpret them into actionable conclusions and new hypotheses.
- Develop new opportunities. With your finger on the pulse of the market, the customers and the engineering teams, you are uniquely positioned to bring new products to market that solve real customer problems.
Examples of desirable skills, knowledge and experience
You are entrepreneurial-minded and thrive in a fast-paced and goal-driven environment. You have outstanding communication and collaboration skills and are able to work with a diverse group, get consensus, and drive the product forward. You are execution focused and emphasize getting things done while paying attention to important details. You have several years of experience working with enterprise, SaaS, or security technologies. You have a passion for building SaaS products and want to solve the problems of performance, security, and reliability of the Internet.
- Minimum 4 years of product management or equivalent experience with demonstrated ability to discover opportunities, and then define and deliver products.
- Exceptional communication, presentation, organizational, and analytical skills.
- Demonstrated ability to lead, drive consensus, and deliver in a matrix organization with multiple stakeholders.
- Must be able to define and manage complex process and/or product issues of a broad scope using independent judgment.
- Experience balancing execution, agility, and culture at a fast growing business.
- Strong technical abilities. You are intimately familiar with modern software development practices used to build and deploy applications and data systems. You’ve preferably been working full time on a software delivery team.
- Deep customer and stakeholder empathy. You must be not only the voice of the customer, but at various times the voice of marketing, finance, engineering, support and ops. You must be able to channel many points of view.
- Experience working with data analysis at scale. An understanding of how to make big data small.
Bonus Points
- Scripting/programming experience (Python, Go, etc.) and familiarity with data analysis tools (eg SQL, pandas).
- Theoretical and practical knowledge of how the Internet works at layers 1 through 7.
- Experience in building or operating large-scale IP networks. Specific expertise in BGP and DNS a plus.
- Hands-on experience with tools used for interacting with, debugging, and testing networks and applications (e.g. curl, dig, mtr, iperf, Wireshark, etc.)
- Ability to validate early ideas through quantitative and qualitative methods (A/B and multivariate testing, user testing, etc).
- Scripting/programming experience
- A solid understanding of RESTful API design & documentation.
- Experience developing pricing for new enterprise SaaS products.
- Capacity planning, cost modeling, and operations research experience.