Senior Product Manager

Company Overview

HopDrive is building an enterprise-ready mobility platform for the automotive industry. We began as a vehicle logistics business, coordinating moves through our driver network and dispatch operations. The software built to support that work now powers standalone SaaS products, while transportation services remain central to our business.

Our software portfolio includes Valet Lite, Guest Rides, Return Rides, Parts Delivery, Mobile Service, and Appraisals. Our transportation services include Full-Service Valet and Operational Moves. These offerings are at different stages of development and availability but share a common technology foundation.

Customers can manage their own teams with HopDrive SaaS or use full-service solutions backed by HopDrive-provided labor and operational resources.

We're a growing startup that pairs ambitious goals with a healthy work-life balance. We value collaboration, curiosity, ownership, and a growth mindset, and welcome people from all backgrounds.

Job Description

We're seeking a Senior Product Manager to guide the direction and evolution of HopDrive's products. You'll combine customer needs, business priorities, market insights, and usage data to decide which problems are worth solving. With leadership and Engineering, you'll discover and shape opportunities, recommend priorities, and help new capabilities launch, gain adoption, and deliver measurable value.

This role spans strategy, operational workflows, technical collaboration, go-to-market readiness, and continuous product improvement. You'll partner with Technology, Client Success, Sales, Operations, Finance, Marketing, leadership, customers, and end users.

We use

Shape Up in eight-week cycles

: six weeks of development followed by two weeks of planning and shaping. The Senior Product Manager leads discovery, shaping, and prioritization recommendations, while

software product engineers own technical solutions, execution planning, and delivery

. This is not a Scrum Master, sprint manager, or traditional project management position.

You'll help keep our independently offered SaaS products and transportation services coherent, identifying where customer workflows should be shared and where they should differ. We're looking for someone eager to observe real operations firsthand, use our products, challenge assumptions, and build trust across technical and nontechnical teams.

What You'll Do

• Own product direction and discovery.

Understand our customers, users, business model, products, and workflows. Gather input from customers, drivers, field teams, Client Success, Sales, Operations, Marketing, Engineering, and leadership. Use interviews, observation, market signals, and product data to uncover underlying problems.

Treat feature requests as inputs, not commitments.

• Recommend the next bets.

Evaluate customer impact, commercial priorities, product performance, and strategic opportunities for each Shape Up cycle. Maintain an evolving product direction without locking the company into a fixed long-term feature roadmap. Help leadership make informed prioritization decisions.

• Shape opportunities with engineers.

Turn worthwhile problems into compelling Shape Up pitches with a clear problem, value, appetite, constraints, tradeoffs, and measurable outcomes. Participate in betting decisions; leave implementation approaches and delivery ownership with software product engineers.

• Support development without managing sprints.

Clarify customer needs, answer product questions, make informed scope tradeoffs, and validate whether completed work solves the intended problem. Engineers own technical decisions, tasks, schedules, and delivery.

• Get close to the user.

Interview representative end users, visit active markets, observe dealership and mobility workflows, and use our driver and mobility products firsthand. Validate solutions with people who actually perform the work, not only the stakeholder requesting a feature.

• Create a cohesive portfolio.

Align shared capabilities where appropriate while accounting for differences between customers using HopDrive SaaS with their own teams and customers purchasing HopDrive-operated services.

• Define and measure product outcomes.

Establish success criteria before development and work with engineers on analytics and instrumentation. For SaaS, examine signup, onboarding, time to first value, activation, retention, and expansion. Use usage data, operational metrics, customer feedback, and experiments to inform future bets.

• Inform commercial strategy.

Partner with Sales, Finance, and Marketing on product packaging, trial experiences, pricing recommendations, and opportunities to grow our SaaS business.

• Own launch readiness.

Verify that capabilities are complete, available, tested, supportable, and ready for customers. Coordinate demonstrations, release notes, documentation, training, SOP updates, support preparation, and internal enablement with engineers and business teams.

• Partner with Product & Growth Marketing.

Work closely with the Marketing Manager, Product & Growth on launches and adoption. Product owns capability definition, readiness, in-product onboarding, and activation; Marketing owns positioning, audience messaging, acquisition campaigns, and sales materials. Collaborate on adoption, retention, and growth using feedback and performance data.

• Improve products after launch.

Reduce friction in self-service signup, trials, onboarding, and ongoing workflows. Use analytics, user research, and experimentation to increase adoption and customer value rather than treating deployment as the finish line.

• Represent product in the industry.

Attend relevant automotive events, including the National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA) trade show, to learn from customers and follow emerging trends.

• Build lightweight practices.

Establish repeatable discovery, launch, and adoption processes that create clarity and accountability without unnecessary bureaucracy.

What Success Looks Like

• Product bets are grounded in real user problems, business value, and measurable outcomes before development starts.
• Progress is judged by customer and business results, not the number of features shipped.
• HopDrive's SaaS and full-service offerings evolve as a coherent portfolio, with clear decisions about shared and distinct workflows.
• Business stakeholders provide expertise and decisions without serving as temporary product managers, project managers, trainers, or rollout coordinators.
• Representative users validate workflows before launch; technically complete features are also usable in practice.
• Major launches have the documentation, communication, training, measurement, and team readiness needed for adoption.
• Marketing, Sales, Client Success, Operations, and Technology can explain, operate, support, and promote new capabilities.
• Post-launch data, feedback, and field learning consistently shape improvements and future priorities.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent education and professional experience.
• 5+ years in software product management

, with demonstrated ownership of product strategy, discovery, prioritization, product decisions, and customer outcomes. Experience limited to project management, Scrum Master, or delivery coordination roles does not meet this requirement.

• Track record guiding software products or major capabilities through discovery, delivery, launch, adoption, measurement, and iteration.
• Experience in B2B SaaS, workflow or operational software, marketplaces, logistics technology, or similarly complex products.
• Strong discovery and problem-framing skills; able to distinguish customer problems from requested solutions.
• Technical fluency to collaborate credibly on APIs, integrations, data flows, systems behavior, analytics, instrumentation, constraints, and tradeoffs. Coding experience is not required.
• Ability to establish meaningful success metrics and use analytics, telemetry, reporting, and operational data to assess results.
• Excellent communication, facilitation, organization, prioritization, cross-functional collaboration, and follow-through.
• Experience coordinating software launches, training, enablement, change management, and adoption with business and technical teams.
• Proactive, pragmatic, independent, and effective in a fast-moving startup.
• Willing to work with users and operators in the field and travel occasionally for firsthand discovery.
• Shape Up familiarity is a plus, not a requirement. Sound judgment and the ability to adapt processes matter more.
• Automotive, mobility, logistics, or dealership technology experience preferred.

Position Details

• Employment:

Full-time; standard business hours with flexibility as needed.

• Location:

Richmond, Virginia. Hybrid schedule: three days per week in the Richmond office; remaining days remote.

• Geographic expectation:

Live within approximately one hour's drive of the Richmond office and consistently participate in in-person collaboration.

• Reports to:

Chief Technology Officer.

• Travel:

Occasional trips for customer discovery, field observation, launches, and business needs.

• Work environment:

Office, remote, and periodic customer or operator field settings.

• Physical Requirements: Ability to work at digital workstations for extended periods, communicate clearly in person and remotely, travel occasionally, and participate in field observation and product-use activities as appropriate

Compensation and Benefits

• Anticipated base salary range for this position is $165,000–$200,000 annually
• Medical, Dental & Vision benefits
• Unlimited PTO
• 401(k) with safe harbor match eligible after 12 months of employment