Staff Product Manager

What We’re Building

Honeycomb is a service for the near and present future, defining observability and raising expectations of what developer tools can do! We’re working with well known companies like HelloFresh, Slack, LaunchDarkly, and Vanguard and more across a range of industries. This is an exciting time in our trajectory, we’ve closed Series D funding, scaled past the 200-person mark, and were named to Forbes’ America’s Best Startups of 2022 and 2023!

If you want to see what we’ve been up to, please check out these blog posts and Honeycomb.io press releases.

Who We Are

We come for the impact, and stay for the culture! We’re a talented, opinionated, passionate, fiercely inclusive, and responsible group of bees. We have conviction and we strive to live our values every day. We want our people to do what they truly love amongst a team of highly talented (but humble) peers.

How We Work

We are a fully distributed company, which means we believe it is not where you sit, but how you deliver that matters most. We invest in our people and care about how you orient to our culture and processes. At the same time we imbue a lot of trust, autonomy, and accountability from Day 1.

Little more about the team:

You'll be the product manager for our Canvas and Agentic AI teams - the teams building Honeycomb's AI-powered investigation experience. Canvas lets engineers use natural language to query, visualize, and understand their production systems. We're pushing well past chat: we're building Skills (pre-configured workflows that encode domain expertise into repeatable, executable actions), Auto-Investigations (agent-driven investigations that kick off before a human gets paged), and a rearchitected Canvas that's both interactive and collaborative.

You'll work in a tight triad with engineering and design leads, owning the roadmap for how AI shows up in Honeycomb, from the product UI to our MCP server. You'll partner with our Director of AI Strategy, Research & Development teams, and our customer-facing teams to stay grounded in what customers actually need while pushing toward something meaningfully different from what exists today.

This is a role for someone who can hold both execution and ambiguity: shipping production features while navigating a product space where the right answers are still emerging.

What you’ll do in the role:

Define AI product strategy in service of Honeycomb's vision

• Synthesize AI trends, customer needs, and technical capabilities into clear strategic recommendations
• Help the product organization understand where and how AI creates genuine customer value vs. where it's hype
• Identify emerging observability challenges created by AI adoption (e.g., LLM drift, prompt regression, low-context generated code)
• Make informed bets about which AI technologies and approaches warrant investment

Conduct research that bridges technology and customer reality

• Build deep understanding of how customers are adopting AI in their engineering workflows
• Identify patterns across customer conversations that signal future market needs
• Stay current with AI/ML developments (RAG, fine-tuning, agentic systems, etc.) and translate implications for observability
• Engage with technical communities, researchers, and early adopters to spot trends before they go mainstream

Enable AI innovation across the product portfolio

• Partner with product teams to identify high-value opportunities to leverage AI capabilities
• Provide guidance on AI approaches, trade-offs, and best practices without centralizing all decisions
• Help teams understand how their work fits into our broader AI strategy and how to leverage shared capabilities
• Synthesize cross-portfolio learnings and socialize what's working (and what isn't)

Evangelize the AI-observability connection

• Articulate Honeycomb's point of view on AI observability both internally and externally
• Help customers understand how observability needs evolve as they adopt AI
• Contribute to thought leadership through writing, speaking, and community engagement
• Build credibility with technical audiences who care deeply about how we use AI, not just that we use it

What you’ll bring to the role:

Proven AI product experience

• 5+ years in product management with at least 1+ year shipping AI/ML-powered products
• Track record of taking AI features from concept to customer impact, including things that didn't work
• Deep understanding of how engineering teams actually build, deploy, and operate AI systems (not just theoretical knowledge)
• Familiarity with current AI/ML techniques and the judgment to know when they're applicable vs. overhyped

Strategic thinking with customer empathy

• Ability to synthesize disparate signals (research, customer feedback, technical trends) into coherent strategy
• Comfort operating with ambiguity and making decisions without perfect information
• Pattern recognition across conversations—spotting what customers aren't yet saying clearly
• Strong judgment about when to say "no" or "not yet" despite exciting technology

Technical credibility without needing to be the expert

• Enough technical depth to have earned respect from engineers and architects
• Genuine curiosity about how things work, paired with humility about what you don't know
• Ability to evaluate trade-offs between different AI approaches (RAG vs. fine-tuning, model selection, etc.)
• Understanding of observability principles and why they matter in production systems

Communication and collaboration skills

• Excellent written and verbal communication—can explain complex ideas clearly to varied audiences
• Ability to influence without authority across product, engineering, and go-to-market teams
• Comfort presenting to customers, executives, and technical audiences
• Collaborative mindset that elevates others' work rather than centralizing control

Curiosity and learning orientation

• Demonstrated ability to stay current in fast-moving domains (AI is evolving weekly, not yearly)
• Intellectual humility—you're more interested in learning than being right
• Excitement about the intersection of AI technology and real customer problems
• Energized rather than exhausted by the pace of change in AI

Compensation

Base Salary based on level of experience

$198,500 — $233,500 USD

What you'll get when you join the Hive:

• A stake in our success - generous equity with employee-friendly stock program
• It’s not about how strong of a negotiator you are - our pay is based on transparent levels relative to experience
• Time to recharge with unlimited PTO
• A distributed-first mindset and culture (really!)
• Home office, co-working, and internet stipend
• Full benefits coverage for employees, with additional coverage available for dependents
• Up to 16 weeks of paid parental leave, regardless of path to parenthood
• Annual development allowance
• And much more...

Please note we cannot currently sponsor or support visa transfers at this time. Additionally, in compliance with applicable law, all persons hired will be required to verify identity and eligibility to work.

Diversity & Accommodations

We're committed to building a diverse, inclusive, and equitable workplace—where people of all backgrounds, identities, experiences, and abilities are welcomed, valued, and supported. We recognize that there is no single path to success and embrace nontraditional career journeys and diverse perspectives as key to building stronger, more innovative teams.

We strive to ensure an inclusive experience throughout every stage of our hiring process and are happy to provide reasonable accommodations as needed. If you require accommodations or accessible formats at any point during our hiring process, please let your recruiter know.

As an equal opportunity employer our hiring process is designed to put you at ease and help you show your best work. If there’s anything we can do to improve your experience, we’re always open to feedback.