Product Manager

We are open to applications from ambitious students graduating in 2025 or sooner.

High-Level Role and Responsibilities

Location: Canada (Toronto while working full-time), Hybrid (ET time zone). We have a brand new office in downtown Toronto and the expectation is that you will spend at least a couple of days of the week working out of the office with your team when full-time.
Job Function: Product Manager
‍Timeline: Starting in January 2024

Employment Requirements

1. Must be eligible to work in Canada (or able to receive a work permit before commencing full-time work).

About Onova

Onova is a consultancy and product studio with three areas of expertise:

(1) Taking products from 0 to 1. We have over a decade of experience in building and launching products and services, both within and outside of massive organizations.
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(2) Facilitation and event design. We are deeply passionate about designing high impact events at scale, whether it be 50 people in one city, or 5,000 across 40 countries.
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(3) Digital transformation with AI. We’re building, investing and partnering with AI startups and helping clients identify and implement relevant use cases in this domain.

Our primary consulting offering is running high-impact Innovation Sprints for clients, a program bringing employees together to build solutions to complex problems in a short period of time. We ensure the right challenges are defined and matched with business sponsors. Our facilitation, tools, and environment are designed to foster the creation of creative and innovative solutions. As part of our process in education and product innovation, we provide clients and their employees with the latest design thinking, design sprint, and lean startup processes and methodologies.

About Our Ecosystem of Businesses

Our ecosystem is comprised of multiple businesses including our consulting arm, software products within our product studio, e-commerce business and venture arm. We are entrepreneurs at heart who love to experiment, build, and create.

About Our Products

We are looking for a Product Manager to join our Product Studio and help build Earth (a SaaS hackathon management platform) and PokerGPT (an AI Poker Coach). While your initial focus may be on one specific product, the scope of your involvement may evolve to include a broader range of exciting products, depending on the needs of the company, your alignment with our products, and the timing of your onboarding. This is an exciting opportunity to work on a highly nimble and innovative team that is building the next generation of software products.

Our product teams are very small and fast-moving team that aims for excellence from a technical, design, and business perspective. You will be working directly with only 3-4 other people (Developers and Designers).
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About Earth:
The idea for Earth initially came up at our internal cottage innovation sprint in August 2022. A small team of 3, including our CEO, built a prototype in less than 6 hours and demoed the product to the team. Immediately afterwards, we staffed/hired a small team to take the product to the next level (1 PM, 1 developer, and 1 designer). We’ve since launched and used Earth to run hackathons with thousands of participants. But there is still A LOT of work to do, so we are expanding the team! That’s where you come in.

The core product is a hackathon logistics platform that manages everything from event registration, employee training, team formation, project judging, and integration with other video conferencing platforms. Earth aims to become the single tool that any Fortune 500 company needs to innovate.

About PokerGPT:
Two notable inflections stood out: 1) the explosive growth in Generative AI and 2) the resurgence of the poker industry, propelled by an influx of livestreams, vloggers, and content creators.

PokerGPT marks a significant milestone in our embrace of artificial intelligence with the launch of our first consumer SaaS product.

PokerGPT builds a knowledge base of your playing style and tendencies to provide personalized feedback and coaching. It is capable of offering both game theory optimal strategy and exploitative strategy, taking advantage of weaknesses in specific opponent archetypes—all at a fraction of the cost of hiring a real human coach.

Key Responsibilities

• Define the product vision and strategy based on customer needs and market research, and maintain a product manifesto that summarizes these details for the entire team.
• Develop and maintain the product roadmap in Notion, including weekly prioritization of features and requirements based on business and customer impact.
• Work closely with and lead a team of developers and designers to ensure the successful development and launch of the product.
• Gather product requirements and feedback from product owners and other stakeholders (including the CEO, clients, and other peers within the Onova ecosystem).
• Collaborate with the CEO on the sales strategy, including developing the pricing and leading external demos with clients.
• Conduct market research and analysis to identify customer needs and competition.
• Collaborate with developers to define and implement comprehensive test plans, and lead testing to ensure a client-ready product.
• Develop and maintain comprehensive product documentation, including product requirements, user stories, use cases, test plans, technical specifications, and product launch plans.
• Monitor and analyze product performance and customer feedback to identify opportunities for improvement.
• Provide technical support for the product on client projects.

Required Skills

• Understanding of software development lifecycle, including requirements gathering, design, coding, testing, deployment and maintenance
• Familiarity with agile development methodologies
• Knowledge of technical architecture and design best practices
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BONUS if you have:
• Knowledge of security best practices and ability to identify vulnerabilities
• Formal coding experience in HTML, CSS, JavaScript and/or SQL and understanding of technical architecture
• Formal UI/UX design experience and understanding of design best practices
• Previous experience in tech sales and product management

Success Factors

Have a strong growth mindset and be very receptive to feedback: We have a high-pain, high-gain mentality. Feedback from your peers, manager and co-founders will come often and fast, and this offers you a chance to grow extremely quickly. This may come in the form of 1:1 chats with your manager, and direct feedback on live demos/presentations. You will need to be emotionally resilient and have a strong growth mindset to thrive in our culture.

Have the startup hustle: Our working hours are not a standard 9-5. The team may often work late nights and on weekends to meet deadlines and respond to client needs. We try to balance this during our downtime with slower days/hours when we’re less busy.

Thrive in an ambiguous environment and take ownership: Up to half of your workload will be self-driven, involving actively seeking out problems within the company, proposing solutions, and implementing them. You must feel comfortable working independently and excel in ambiguous environments where explicit instructions may not be provided.

Are emotionally intelligent and self-aware: We expect you to be aware of your own emotions and to effectively process and communicate them with your peers. We encourage our team to embrace vulnerability and openness, as it fosters deeper connections and enhances our ability to work effectively as a team through mutual empathy.

Are highly detail-oriented and organized: We foster a robust written culture at Onova. As a predominantly remote team, it is crucial to document and effectively communicate work and processes throughout the organization. You must exhibit a high level of attention to detail and ensure proper organization so that anyone, even without prior context, can seamlessly pick up where you left off if necessary.

Have strong communication skills: Whether communicating your emotions, presenting in front of an audience, writing documentation, or simply writing an e-mail, you must be a strong communicator. The ability to succinctly and effectively convey your thoughts in any medium is highly valued at Onova.

Are team-oriented and collaborative: Naturally, this is critical for a startup like ours. It's important that everyone feels supported and encouraged to do their best work, but they are also able to support one another proactively.

Enjoy being creative and thinking outside the box: We are a team of creative thinkers who enjoy challenging the status quo and being different. If you enjoy learning and growing in diverse subject areas and thinking about the future, you'll be a great fit.

AI fluency and ability to leverage AI tools: It's important for all members of our team to be well-versed and confident in using AI tools to supercharge and boost their efficiency. It's vital for our team to stay ahead of the curve and continuously learn about new tools that will improve the way we work and/or serve our clients.
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