If you love nothing more than taking an idea from spark to launch, then constantly analyzing and tweaking it, you might be the perfect Product Manager for CalMatters.

We’re a nonprofit, nonpartisan news startup. At the tender age of four-and-a-half, we’re already the largest newsroom covering California policy and politics. We reach hundreds of thousands of people, but we want to engage many more Californians with our work so they can better engage with our democracy.

We have existing products, like our website and our newsletters, that need a real product owner. We have product ideas we want to explore and build. And we want your ideas for new ways to inform, educate and engage the 40 million people who call California home.

The ideal candidate will be someone who works well independently to move a project forward while collaborating closely with many others to make sure it’ll succeed. Someone who’s skilled at building, managing and meeting a collaborative timeline. Someone who can take a crazy idea, apply research and thought and bring back a smart product plan. Someone who understands and embraces the important role of journalism in a democracy while knowing enough about budgeting to make sure we can pay for it.

Responsibilities include:

• Manage, in close collaboration with the newsroom and the rest of our organization, key products including our website and newsletters.
• Plan, execute, analyze and optimize a continuing series of upgrades and adjustments to those products, working with our own team and outside vendors as needed.
• Build short-term and annual budgets for products that at least support themselves and ideally contribute to our overall costs.
• Collaborate with our newsroom and revenue leaders to design, pitch and then execute the kinds of products that enable us to do better journalism and reach more people.
• Bring a product mentality to our thinking and a project-management discipline to our work.

Education or experience related to journalism or communications would be plus but is not required. We’re based in Sacramento, and that’s the best place for in-person collaboration with our team, but we’re also open to creative arrangements with people elsewhere in California.

We are an expanding and collaborative news organization, successfully forging a new model for sustainable, intelligent, nonprofit journalism. We’re committed to diversity and especially encourage members of underrepresented communities to apply. If you’re interested, please provide a resume, a cover letter that outlines how you would approach the job and some examples of your previous successes. Write to [email protected] with the job title in the subject line.