Associate Product Owner
glassdollar · Berlin ·
- Employment
- Contract
- Category
- Product
- Experience
- 3+ years
Full-time. Berlin-based. No remote option available for this role. You sit with the PM.
Join GlassDollar as an Associate Product Owner and own the space between a good idea and a shipped feature.
Someone has to decide what "done" means, write it down clearly enough that an engineer can start on Monday, and stay close enough to the build that the scope does not quietly grow on the way. That is the job. You own it end to end: specs, acceptance criteria, dependencies, and a backlog that keeps everyone honest about what is actually shipping. Nobody hands you a ticket queue you did not write yourself.
GlassDollar OS is the venture clienting platform that makes it repeatable: sourcing the startups, matching them to real problems, running the pilots, and rolling out what works across the whole organisation. Enterprise customers run real innovation budgets through it. What you scope this month decides what they can do next quarter. You have personally written the tickets.
3+ years in a product company, where scoping and ticket-writing were actually your job rather than something you handed off.
You are technical enough to argue with engineers.
AI models, API contracts, estimates, sequencing. You push back with reasons, and you change your mind when the reasons coming back are better.
You can write.
A spec is a piece of writing. We will ask for a sample where the reasoning is visible, polish second.
You write specs worth acting on.
The valuable ones pull three threads together: where the product is going, what clients are actually telling us, and the knowledge already sitting in the team. You gather all three before you write, so what lands on the board is specific enough to build and pointed enough to matter.
You know what looks good.
You have a great sense of design and what feels good for users. We will ask you to build a prototype with AI and illustrate the specs visually.
You have worked somewhere small enough that there was nowhere to hide.
No layers between you and the consequences of a bad spec.
You want to be coached hard.
Direct feedback, weekly, on your actual work. You will scope alongside the product lead until you are doing it alone, and the goal is that this happens fast.
You are fluent with AI tooling, day to day.
We want to see the workflow, not hear it described.
You want the scope to grow.
The people who do best here end up owning areas outright: the major initiatives, the roadmap arguments, and the questions everyone else brings their doubts to. That is earned, and it is genuinely available. Your job: turn validated opportunities into work an engineer can start on Monday.
What you'll be scoping over your first year:
This is a doing role rather than a people-management one. Mid-to-senior individual contributor.
Don't check every box? Apply anyway. We care more about the questions you ask about a brief than the answer you land on. Straightforward. Respectful of your time. No mystery steps.
Someone has to decide what "done" means, write it down clearly enough that an engineer can start on Monday, and stay close enough to the build that the scope does not quietly grow on the way. That is the job. You own it end to end: specs, acceptance criteria, dependencies, and a backlog that keeps everyone honest about what is actually shipping. Nobody hands you a ticket queue you did not write yourself.
The problem you'll be solving
A corporation with 100,000 employees has thousands of expensive operational problems, and somewhere out there a startup has already solved most of them. Getting those two facts to meet is slow, political, and mostly attempted in spreadsheets that die in someone's downloads folder.GlassDollar OS is the venture clienting platform that makes it repeatable: sourcing the startups, matching them to real problems, running the pilots, and rolling out what works across the whole organisation. Enterprise customers run real innovation budgets through it. What you scope this month decides what they can do next quarter. You have personally written the tickets.
3+ years in a product company, where scoping and ticket-writing were actually your job rather than something you handed off.
You are technical enough to argue with engineers.
AI models, API contracts, estimates, sequencing. You push back with reasons, and you change your mind when the reasons coming back are better.
You can write.
A spec is a piece of writing. We will ask for a sample where the reasoning is visible, polish second.
You write specs worth acting on.
The valuable ones pull three threads together: where the product is going, what clients are actually telling us, and the knowledge already sitting in the team. You gather all three before you write, so what lands on the board is specific enough to build and pointed enough to matter.
You know what looks good.
You have a great sense of design and what feels good for users. We will ask you to build a prototype with AI and illustrate the specs visually.
You have worked somewhere small enough that there was nowhere to hide.
No layers between you and the consequences of a bad spec.
You want to be coached hard.
Direct feedback, weekly, on your actual work. You will scope alongside the product lead until you are doing it alone, and the goal is that this happens fast.
You are fluent with AI tooling, day to day.
We want to see the workflow, not hear it described.
You want the scope to grow.
The people who do best here end up owning areas outright: the major initiatives, the roadmap arguments, and the questions everyone else brings their doubts to. That is earned, and it is genuinely available. Your job: turn validated opportunities into work an engineer can start on Monday.
- Turning opportunities into scoped, sequenced, estimable work: specs, acceptance criteria, edge cases, dependencies
- Running the backlog: grooming, prioritisation input, keeping the board honest about what is in flight, blocked, or quietly drifting
- Being the interface between customer signal (support threads, CS conversations, call notes) and the engineering queue
- Coordinating releases and checking that what shipped matches what was scoped
- Presenting product decisions to varied stakeholder groups, from engineers to enterprise clients
What you'll be scoping over your first year:
- Deep integrations into our customers' organisations. Their systems, their data, their identity stack. This is the work that turns GlassDollar from a tool people visit into infrastructure they run on.
- Public REST APIs and MCP servers, so our customers' engineers and their AI agents can build on top of us.
- AI embedded across the product, inside the surfaces people already work in.
- Workflow automation inside the platform, so the work that used to take six meetings and a shared spreadsheet runs itself.
This is a doing role rather than a people-management one. Mid-to-senior individual contributor.
- 3+ years in a product company, where you personally wrote the tickets
- Technical enough to understand a data model, an API contract, and estimation
- Demonstrable writing ability, be ready to share a spec, PRD or decision doc
- B2B enterprise SaaS background
- Familiarity with venture clienting, corporate innovation, or startup-scouting workflows
- Notion fluency
Don't check every box? Apply anyway. We care more about the questions you ask about a brief than the answer you land on. Straightforward. Respectful of your time. No mystery steps.
- Intro call: a quick chat to see if there's a match
- Interview with the PM, including a brief introduction to the work sample: a spec, PRD, or decision doc where your reasoning is visible, plus examples of problems you've framed
- Interview
- Offer: if it clicks, we don't wait around