Lead Product Manager

About Pencil

At Pencil, we are driving innovation in advertising technology through our state-of-the-art SaaS product, which harnesses Generative AI to redefine content creation. Our mission is to make AI the default in advertising without replacing creative people. To achieve this, we need to make sure that our technology isn’t just in the hands of big brands - we need to try to help small businesses and creative individuals too.

The Role: Lead Product Manager

You’ll own Pencil’s core creative engine: our unified editor suite. The goal is simple: make it fast and intuitive to go from “almost there” to “perfect,” with speed, confidence, and control.

Our editors work across a diverse range of output families, including Digital, Display Ads, Email, and Print. While each medium presents distinct constraints and subtle complexities that must be respected, these nuances should not lead to fragmentation or hinder our speed of execution. This role is about setting clear direction, building shared foundations, and driving momentum across the suite so the product feels coherent while still meeting the bar for each output.

You won’t be expected to be the deepest specialist in every editor domain. You will be expected to set strategy, create clarity, and establish reusable primitives and patterns that allow the team to move quickly and ship high-quality experiences across formats.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead strategy and execution for Pencil’s unified editor platform across Digital, Display, Text, Email, and Print.
• Own the roadmap and sequencing: balance shared platform foundations with output-specific depth where it matters.
• Identify the highest-impact “90% to perfect” improvements that remove friction, eliminate workarounds, and help users finish and export work confidently.
• Define core interaction patterns, shared components, and reusable frameworks that scale across editors without fragmenting the product experience.
• Define the product contract between AI and manual editing: predictable, controllable, reversible, and empowering.
• Drive AI-assisted workflows like resizing, relayout, and structured editing capabilities that reduce last-mile effort while preserving user control.
• Use product data and qualitative feedback to validate priorities and measure impact.
• Partner with Customer Success, Sales, and Marketing to understand workflow pain points and adoption barriers.
• Set the pace for the editor team by creating alignment, simplifying complexity, and unblocking cross-cutting decisions.
• Write clear product briefs and specs that enable fast execution without unnecessary process.
• Mentor and support junior teammates, helping them execute effectively while you maintain strategic coherence and quality bar.
• Ensure editors integrate cleanly with external channels, exports, and localization/translation workflows so creative intent becomes shippable output.

Your Background

You might be a great fit if you:

• Have owned a complex product area end-to-end (strategy → roadmap → delivery → iteration) and driven meaningful outcomes.
• Are comfortable working in technically complex systems (editors, creation tools, workflows, or AI-assisted tools).
• Have strong product judgment and can make hard tradeoffs quickly by knowing when to push, simplify, or escalate.
• Have shipped nuanced, high-quality UX by partnering closely with Engineering and Design.
• Can influence without authority and keep cross-functional teams aligned and moving.
• Enjoy mentoring and raising the bar for how a team operates, not just what it ships.

You’ll Thrive Here If You…

• Move Fast. You’re comfortable making decisions with imperfect information, iterating quickly, and fixing things before they become fires.
• Stay Human. You care deeply about users and teammates, and design with empathy for real workflows.
• Act Like an Owner. You take responsibility for outcomes, not just outputs. You spot problems early and take initiative to fix them.
• Keep It Simple. You fight unnecessary complexity, design reusable patterns, and make hard things feel intuitive.
• Love to Surprise. You enjoy finding unexpected ways to delight users, especially in the last mile of polish and usability.

KPIs & Success Measures

We’ll measure success through outcomes and quality, not just output:

• Export conversion rate: % of editor sessions that result in a successful export (overall and by output family).
• Time-to-export: median time from opening/editing to successful export.
• Editor reliability & performance: load time, crash rate, failed exports, major regressions.
• Adoption of key workflows: usage and retention of core editing and AI-assisted capabilities.
• Delivery health (supporting): predictable delivery on the highest-impact roadmap items, with strong iteration velocity.

Benefits

• 25 days PTO plus public holidays, although we operate a Flexible Time Off scheme.
• Health insurance / private medical cover.
• Monthly stipend towards wellness, fitness, and learning and development.
• Remote - work from anywhere in your home country.
• Enhanced parental leave policies, whether you become a parent through birth, adoption or surrogacy.
• Access to our Pencil office in The Shard, London for our UK employees.
• Flexible working hours.

Key skills/competency

• Product Strategy
• Roadmap Ownership
• Generative AI
• SaaS Product Management
• UX Design
• Cross-functional Leadership
• Stakeholder Management
• Data-driven Decisions
• Mentorship
• Advertising Technology