Senior Product Manager

About Narrative

Narrative is one of NZ's fastest-growing software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies. We build AI-powered tools that cater to a worldwide audience of professional photographers, significantly reducing their processing time and improving their daily workflow. Our tools help professional photographers from more than 180 countries enhance their photo selection and editing processes, dramatically increasing their productivity. With backing from top-tier venture capitalists—including Founders Fund—and a team of exceptionally talented staff, we are committed to driving innovation in this space.

See https://narrative.so/careers for more info about Narrative and our culture.

We're committed to building products for professional photographers who work with people from all genders, ethnicities, racial and religious backgrounds. We think it’s important that our team reflects the same diverse audience. We're actively working to grow a diverse team and offer:

• Flexible and remote working options

• 1 month paid parental leave in addition to government leave

• 32 hours a week for up to 6 months on full pay following return from parental leave (for both birthing and non-birthing parents)

• Extended sick leave to support our team to get through the many things life can throw your way.

About the Role

As a Senior Product Manager at Narrative, you’ll work on our flagship product, leading high-impact projects that improve photographers post-shoot workflow at scale. You’ll take user problems and opportunities to shipped outcomes, working hands-on with design and engineering to deliver meaningful product innovation and improvement. Within a few months, you’ll have shipped multiple customer-facing releases, improved our product delivery rhythm, and helped shape a repeatable discovery-to-delivery playbook for the team.

Our product team operates as a single unit within one shared process. There are no dedicated product areas, instead, projects are prioritised, and then run with until delivered. As a Senior PM, you'll lead execution-intensive projects that require deep research, prototyping, sustained coordination, and a lot of drive to get across the line.

Beyond project leadership, you'll own the operational rhythm of the product team, running grooming sessions, and retros that keep engineering and design aligned and moving. You'll report into the Head of Product and work alongside the rest of the product team, collaborating closely with the Head of Design and engineering leads on a daily basis.

We're looking for someone who is comfortable with ambiguity, can take a loosely defined problem and turn it into a structured plan, and thrives on the energy of a small team making a global impact.

What You'll Do:

• Lead projects end to end - take ownership of execution-intensive projects from discovery through to delivery. Define the problem, conduct research, build prototypes, work with a designer and data analyst, and ship the outcome.

• Drive product discovery - write research briefs, lead user interviews, synthesise findings, and turn insights into clear project direction and recommendations.

• Generate project proposals - identify opportunities from research topics, capability improvements, and technical opportunities, and shape them into well-defined project proposals.

• Own product ceremonies - run coarse and fine grooming sessions with design and engineering, and lead cycle retrospectives. You keep the operational engine running.

• Partner with a tech lead - at the transition from discovery to execution, bring in a tech lead who co-owns delivery. Together you plan the technical approach, break down tasks, and define the delivery timeline.

• Manage project execution - create tasks, assign them to triage, groom them with engineers, and own all project communications including status updates, stakeholder alignment, and rollout comms.

• Own the tooling - become the team's Linear power user, managing project setup, workflows, and label configuration. Field product-related questions via Slack and email, keeping the team unblocked.

• Use data to inform decisions - work with the data on your own or with the data analyst to understand user behaviour, evaluate experiments, and ground product decisions in evidence rather than instinct.

About You

You're a product manager who gets energy from shipping. You enjoy the full arc of product work, from research questions through to coordinated delivery  and you're at your best when you've got a complex project to drive and a cross-functional team to work with.

You're structured but not rigid. You're comfortable running a room.  You care about the details but you also see the bigger picture deciding when to move fast or when to slow down and put on extra polish. You also care deeply at how your work connects to the company's direction.

You will bring:

• A track record of leading product projects end to end in a cross-functional team, from research and discovery through to delivery and rollout.

• Experience running product ceremonies and keeping an engineering team aligned and unblocked.

• Strong research skills — you can design a research approach, lead interviews, and synthesise findings into actionable recommendations.

• Comfort working with data — you can read dashboards, interpret experiment results, and use quantitative evidence alongside qualitative research to make product decisions.

• The ability to take ambiguous problems and structure them into clear projects with well-defined tasks and milestones.

• A collaborative working style — you'll be working alongside a designer, engineers, a data analyst, and a product analyst as peers on a daily basis.

• A genuine interest in how product processes work and a desire to improve them.

Skills & Experience

Required:

• 5+ years of product management experience

• Experience leading projects through the full product lifecycle — discovery, prototyping, planning, delivery

• Experience running product ceremonies in a cross-functional team

• Strong proficiency with project management tools (Linear, Jira, or similar)

• Experience with user research — planning, conducting, and synthesising qualitative research

• Comfort interpreting product data — dashboards, experiment results, and behavioural analytics

• Strong data fluency with knowledge of SQL and/or Python for ad-hoc data exploration

• Strong cross-functional delivery: planning, sequencing, stakeholder comms

• Comfort interpreting product data - dashboards, experiment results, and behavioural analytics

Nice to Have:

• Experience in photography software or creative tools

• Familiarity with AI/ML product development and experiment evaluation

• Experience working in a small, fast-moving team where you wear multiple hats

• Experience presenting complex concepts to audiences

Narrative is committed to building AI software that works for people from all genders, ethnicities, racial and religious backgrounds. We want our team to reflect this focus. Research shows that men apply to jobs when they meet an average of 60% of the criteria, while women and other underrepresented individuals tend to only apply when they check every box. So, if you really love the idea of working for Narrative, and think you have what it takes, please apply, even if you do not tick every box in the job description.

If this sounds like you, please apply with a cover letter and CV!