Product Ops Engineer

Another job post, another vague job description, right? Well, fingers crossed this one’s different. Here’s the scoop for the skeptic in you:

We are SomewhereWarm, a small, fully distributed software team behind some of the most sought-after WooCommerce plugins in existence. We’ve been at it for almost a decade now: If anything, we’ve made our fair share of mistakes, and have learned what it takes to build and support great products. But there’s still a lot to build and learn — and we need your help to make it happen.

As a Product Ops Engineer, you will be sitting right between the Product Manager (hey, that’s me) and our Support and Engineering teams. You:

• are a great writer and communicator with a highly developed sense of agency and empathy;
• are a critical thinker who loves to challenge accepted solutions;
• understand how to build trust through clarity and empathy;
• possess native-level fluency in written English and believe that words can change worlds;
• are comfortable with written, asynchronous communication and self-directed work;
• treasure self-improvement, calmness and thoroughness over self-promotion, office politics and deadlines; and
• live to leave the people and things around you better than you found them.

The Job

Your first couple months with us will be dedicated to studying our products, customers and ecosystem. To help you get up to speed, we will guide you through a training plan that will also familiarize you with our team’s structure, principles and operating procedures.

Once you’ve become an expert with WooCommerce and our products, you will:

• Work alongside our Support team, helping merchants around the world succeed with our products.
• Transfer product knowledge and communicate product changes to our Support Engineers and customers.
• Triage Support tickets and analyze customer feedback to discover actionable information and new insights.
• Work independently to identify usability or performance bottlenecks in existing features.
• Organize our Support team’s retrospectives and identify causes of friction and sources of waste.
• Investigate issue reports, uncover bugs, and validate fixes.
• Assess the potential impact of upcoming product changes.
• Maintain and update our product documentation.
• Expand and regularly review our internal knowledge base.
• Help the Product Manager maintain our 7 backlogs and Kanban project board.
• Actively contribute to validation/testing tasks.
• Assist in story development (we really like BDD).
• Write product copy, announcements and blog posts.

In parallel with your main responsibilities, and depending on your experience and interests, you will be encouraged to:

• Learn more about software testing and test automation.
• Level up your design skills and contribute to the process of building new user experiences.
• Expand your understanding of agile methodologies, and perhaps put your own experience in practice.
• Help us further cultivate our continuous improvement culture.

Your role will require you to work alongside our Support team on a daily basis. At SomewhereWarm, everything we do comes back to helping our Support team and customers succeed. Does the idea of working with customers give you warm feelings? If yes, well, then keep reading!

You

You have previously worked as a Product Owner, Project Manager, Senior QA Engineer, or Support Lead — or perhaps you once built and supported your own products. You love simplicity, are thirsty for some creative freedom, and can’t help but see the forest _and_ the trees. In the last few months, your allergy to meetings and constant interruptions has probably gone worse, but you haven’t abandoned all hope just yet. After all, this is 2021.

On a technical level, you:

• have rich experience in customer support, project management, or software quality;
• possess a very solid understanding of core web technologies, but aren’t too excited about writing code; and
• are familiar with continuous integration practices, and wish you could dive in deeper.

SomewhereWarm

At SomewhereWarm, we support a life well-lived, at work and away from it. We value autonomy and trust, and are passionate advocates of remote work. If you like the idea of joining a team to work and grow with, and not for (or out of), then we would love to hear from you!

We offer:

• a great salary, adjusting upwards as your impact increases (€45000-€60000/yr as a self-employed contractor or via your own company, or €1600-€2200/mo net if hired in Greece);
• private, individual medical insurance with Allianz;
• a flexible leave policy;
• your own learning and development fund;
• a brand-new, top-of-the-line Apple laptop;
• a 4K display or iPad Pro to extend your desktop after your first few months with us;
• a latest-gen iPhone after your first year;
• a calm atmosphere and laid back attitude that encourages you to do — and to be — your best;
• the freedom to work from: (a) home, (b) our awesome office space, or (c) wherever you want.

A Day At Work

Wondering what it’s like to work with us? Here’s how a day in your new life might be:

09:30 AM — You wake up at home and grab a coffee or snack. In a different, post-COVID world, you leave home to join your teammates at the office.
10:10 AM — You review your e-mail, check Slack for new messages from the rest of the team, and then join everyone for the team’s virtual stand-up.
10:20 AM — After getting looped in on the team’s status, you log into a merchant’s site to investigate a potential bug.
11:00 AM — You have isolated and replicated the issue on your local development environment. Time to log a detailed bug report on GitHub, assess its severity and priority, and mobilize our Engineering team!
12:00 PM — The team has confirmed what you suspected: It’s a bug, not a feature! While our Software Engineers roll up their sleeves, you join your teammates from Support to help them clear the queue!
13:30 PM — The fix is ready! While waiting for automated tests to pass, you check out the branch with the fix and carry out some manual tests. Then, you build a patched, pre-release version of the plugin and share it with the customer.
15:00 PM — While scanning our queue, a customization request catches your eye: You’ve seen this before. After sharing a solution with the customer, you tag the ticket as “actionable” and jot down a few notes. This needs to be discussed at the team’s Product Hangout.
16:00 PM — The support queue is cleared, so you decide to take a break for a couple hours.

Later, you grab your laptop again and scan the queue for more actionable data — or perhaps you help the team ship a major release by updating product documentation.

Sounds interesting? Apply!