Senior Product Manager

The job

You will own a slice of Campspot's business — a customer problem, the outcome it drives, and the product that solves it. Today, Campspot is the leading Campground Management Software, and you will work to make it even better.

AI is changing where a product manager's time goes. Specs, user stories, research syntheses, status decks, and the translation layer between customers and engineers can now be produced in minutes. We are looking less for someone who produces them faster and more for the judgment those documents were always meant to contain: knowing which problems matter, how to create real value, and when to kill a plausible idea.

The scarce thing is no longer whether we can build something. It is whether we should, and whether it got used. That is the heart of the job.

What you will own

• An outcome, not a backlog. You are accountable for a business result in a defined part of the product — a revenue line, a retention number, an adoption rate — and for the customer segment behind it. Features are how you get there, not what you are measured on.
• The customer, unmediated. You will come to know campground operators deeply: their economics, their seasonality, their business problems, how they actually make decisions. You will get that by talking to them directly and often. You will build that understanding firsthand.
• The first version. The spec is a working prototype. When you have a hypothesis, you will build it — with AI tools, with our data, with whatever gets you to something clickable and testable in a day — before an engineer touches it. Engineers get a working input, not a document.
• The decision to kill. Building is cheaper now, so you will have no shortage of plausible options. Your job is to choose, to say no, and to keep the product coherent instead of letting it fragment into a hundred locally-reasonable features. You will hold a wider scope than a traditional PM, and that means more things you decline than things you ship.
• Whether it worked. You define success before you build, instrument it, and run the loop honestly. Shipping and course-correcting are cheap; not noticing is not. You will own the measurement, not delegate it.
• Adoption. In our market the hard part was never the build. It is getting a park manager to change how they work. Rollout, change management, customer communication, and working with our customer-facing teams are the core of the role, not an afterthought once engineering is done.

This is not the job if

We want this to be a good fit for both of us, so it helps to be clear up front. This role may not be right for you if:

• Your proudest work is a document. A great PRD, a thorough competitive analysis, a beautiful roadmap deck. We value the thinking behind them more than the artifact itself.
• You measure your week by how much you shipped, how many stories you wrote, or how many stakeholders you aligned. We measure it by what customers did differently.
• You need engineers to build your ideas before you can see whether they are any good.
• You are looking for a role where process ownership — running ceremonies, grooming backlogs, keeping Jira clean — counts as impact. We have those things. They matter, but they are not the core of the job.
• You are most comfortable when the plan is settled before you act. You will sometimes be wrong here, in front of customers and the team, and the expected response is to measure it and change course rather than defend the plan.
• You want a clear ladder of PM titles to climb. There are fewer product roles here, each with a wider scope, and the path up looks more like running a bigger piece of the business than managing more PMs.

How we work

You will be the product lead across a group of pods. A pod is a small, durable team of engineers, working with shared resources across product and design, that owns an area end to end. In the product team, you will help decide which projects get prioritized and which pod takes them on. From there, the pod works closely together to build, iterate, and deliver, learning from customers as it goes.

We build AI-first. That means engineers use AI tools to write most of the code, and it means you use them to do most of what used to be PM paperwork: prototypes, data pulls, customer-call synthesis, drafts of anything. The time that frees up goes to customers and to decisions.

A typical week looks like several customer conversations, a prototype or two you built yourself, a review of what last week's release actually did to the numbers, and a small number of decisions that matter. It does not look like a calendar full of status meetings.

You will have direct access to usage data, customer feedback, and the people who talk to customers every day. We hope you will use all of it proactively.

We are early in this model and still working out parts of it. You will help shape how pods run, not inherit a finished playbook.

Qualifications

We care about what you have done, not what you have been called. The title on your resume might be product manager, founder, general manager, operator, engineer, or something else completely. Ideal candidates will be able to show and speak to:

• A business outcome you owned and moved, with the number, and an honest account of what you got wrong on the way.
• Something you built yourself to test an idea before anyone else was assigned to it. A prototype, a script, a spreadsheet model, a landing page — anything that produced a real signal.
• A decision to kill or cut something that other people wanted, and how you made the case.
• Evidence that you have been close to customers in a way that changed what you built. Not "ran a research program"; a specific thing you learned from a specific person that the data would not have told you.
• Fluency with current AI tools as a daily working instrument, not a novelty. You should be quick with them across the work that used to take up most of a PM's time.
• Comfort with ambiguity and with being measured.
• Comfort operating in environments where the traditional boundaries between PM, design, and engineering are blurring — and enthusiasm for what that makes possible.

Preferred:

• Experience in hospitality, outdoor recreation, or vertical SaaS for small operators.
• Experience shipping into a market where the user is not the buyer.
• Experience in product management as well as other functional areas such as engineering, customer success, go to market, or general operations.

Compensation & Benefits

• Anticipated starting annual salary: $120k-$160k
• Competitive benefits, including medical, dental, vision, life, and disability insurance options at affordable rates
• 401(k) plan with employer match
• Flexible and casual work environment
• Employee camping credit to encourage getting outdoors and experiencing our product!

We are prioritizing candidates in our hiring hubs of Grand Rapids (MI), Denver (CO), and Chicago (IL) who are interested in regular in-person collaboration. Secondary consideration may be given to candidates who reside in states where we currently have employees outside of our hubs, including MA, NH, NY, NC, OR, TX, UT, VT, VA, and Canada. Candidates located outside of the locations listed previously are not able to be considered at this time.

Campspot is a motivated team of outdoor enthusiasts and software professionals with decades of experience in the campground and outdoor industry. We’re looking to grow with people who embody our culture of learning, collaboration, and innovation. Today our portfolio includes two distinct but synergistic products: 

1. Campspot Management Software (https://software.campspot.com/) is the leading provider of reservation management software and tools for campgrounds and RV parks. It revolutionized the industry through its proprietary technology, allowing park owners to increase revenue through its inventory optimization tool and site-lock capabilities. 

2. The Campspot Marketplace (campspot.com and Campspot mobile app) is an online marketplace where travelers can find accommodations for their camping trips. Campspot’s inventory is 100% bookable and includes robust filters to help travelers customize their travel experience.