Product Manager Job Description
A mid-level product manager job description template, with the ATS keywords hiring teams screen for and how the title's scope varies by company.
"Product Manager" is one job title covering several different jobs. At one company it means someone with real authority over a roadmap, a budget, and the definition of success for their area. At another it means a coordinator who routes engineering requests and writes status updates, with none of the authority the title implies. Both postings say "Product Manager." Neither says which one it is.
This is the family where years of experience correlates worst with capability, and it is worth understanding why. A software engineer with five years has usually written five years of code regardless of employer. A product manager with five years may have spent that time making real prioritization calls under real constraints, or may have spent it running scrum ceremonies for a roadmap someone else owned. The resume looks the same either way. What differs is what they were actually allowed to decide — and that almost never makes it onto the page.
The practical result is that the real screening bar for this role is rarely the resume. It is a work sample, a case study walkthrough, or a set of interview questions that ask a candidate to reason through a prioritization tradeoff live. If you are applying, expect that regardless of what the posting emphasizes. If you are hiring, a posting that lists tools and ceremonies (Jira, Agile, sprint planning) instead of decisions the person will actually own is asking for the wrong things and will get resumes that match it.
Halbrenn · Atlanta, GA
Full-time · On-site
$105,000 – $145,000
About the role
Halbrenn is hiring a Product Manager to own the scheduling module inside our operations platform — the screen dispatchers at mid-market logistics and field-service companies live in for most of their shift. You'll set priorities for a squad of four engineers and one designer, working from usage data and direct customer conversations rather than requests routed through account management.
This is an on-site role in our Atlanta office, five days a week. We made that call deliberately: this team ships on a two-week cycle, and product calls that would otherwise take three Slack threads and a missed context get made in ten minutes standing at a whiteboard.
What you'll do
- Own the roadmap and quarterly priorities for the scheduling module, from problem definition through launch.
- Write product requirements that engineering can estimate and design can act on without a follow-up meeting to explain what you meant.
- Run customer discovery calls yourself — not through account management — and turn what you hear into backlog decisions you can defend.
- Define success metrics for each release and report on them honestly, including the ones that miss.
- Prioritize a backlog that will always have more good ideas in it than engineering time to build them.
- Sit in daily standups and weekly planning in person, working directly with your engineering and design leads.
- Represent the roadmap to sales and customer success without letting either one quietly set it for you.
- Own the launch handoff for new features: release notes, internal training, and the first two weeks of adoption data.
What we're looking for
- 3+ years as a product manager with real ownership of a defined product area — not primarily running ceremonies for someone else's roadmap.
- Direct experience writing requirements, prioritizing a backlog, and saying no to a stakeholder in a way they accept.
- Comfortable enough with SQL to answer "how many customers actually use this" yourself, without waiting on an analyst.
- A track record of shipped features you can describe in terms of what changed for the customer, not just what shipped.
- Clear written communication — this role runs on documents at least as much as meetings.
- Able to work on-site in Atlanta five days a week.
Nice to have
- Experience in logistics, field service, or another operationally heavy B2B vertical.
- Enough SQL fluency to write your own exploratory queries against a production database.
- Experience running structured discovery — interviews, surveys — rather than working only from support tickets.
- A background in engineering, design, or customer success before moving into product.
- Experience with experimentation: A/B tests, phased rollouts, feature flags.
Benefits
- Medical, dental and vision coverage, with employee premiums covered in full.
- 401(k) with a 4% company match, vested immediately.
- Twenty days of paid time off plus company holidays.
- Relocation assistance for candidates moving to Atlanta.
- $1,500 annual learning budget, usable on courses, books or conferences.
Salary range
As posted for this sample role. Real pay varies by employer, location and experience.
$105,000–$145,000/ yr
ATS keywords for this role
The applicant tracking system (ATS) — the recruiting software a hiring team searches and filters applicants with — will screen for these. Weight shows how central each one is to this specific posting.
Required and central (4)
Important (7)
Mentioned in passing (8)
Frequently asked questions
What's the difference between a Product Manager and a Project Manager?
In principle, a Product Manager decides what gets built and why, and a Project Manager coordinates when and how it gets delivered. In practice, at smaller companies one person often does both, and titles get used loosely enough that a posting called "Product Manager" occasionally describes work that is mostly scheduling. Read the responsibilities list, not just the title.
Do I need a technical background to be a Product Manager?
No, but on a technical product you need enough fluency to have a real conversation with engineers about tradeoffs, not just relay their answers upward. Plenty of strong PMs come from sales, customer success, design or operations. What matters is whether you can learn the technical shape of the product fast, not whether you already knew it.
How many years of experience do I need for a mid-level PM role?
Postings usually say three to five, but treat the number loosely — this is the title where years of tenure correlates worst with actual capability. Someone who owned real prioritization decisions for two years is often a stronger candidate than someone who sat in PM meetings for six. Interviewers increasingly know this too, which is why the process leans on case studies more than resumes.
This was a sample. Your resume should be tailored to the real thing.
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