About the role
StatsLateral runs fixed-scope, milestone-billed engagements with growth-stage and PE-backed companies — turning AI and product investments into revenue customers value. Associate PMs are the operating spine of those engagements: they keep engineering moving, turn executive intent into shippable specs, and make sure the client sees momentum every week.
This is a freelance, hourly role. You'll plug into one or more client engagements at a time, working alongside senior operators (founder, CTO, CPO) and directly with client executives.
What you'll own
- Sprint coordination — run daily standups and weekly planning with engineering teams (in-house and client-side). Translate strategy into a backlog that ships on cadence.
- AI-assisted product specs — produce specs, PRDs, and acceptance criteria using modern AI tooling. The bar is not "wrote it with AI." The bar is judgment: which detail to keep, which to cut, where the spec is wrong and needs a second pass.
- Mockups and prototypes — generate low- and mid-fidelity mockups with AI design tools (v0, Figma AI, Lovable, etc.) to align engineering and executives quickly. Iterate from a working artifact, not a slide.
- User research — design and run targeted research (5–8 interviews per cycle), synthesize with AI assistance, and turn findings into prioritization decisions the team can act on.
- Executive interface — present trade-offs and progress to startup founders, CTOs, and client-side executives. Write the weekly readout that keeps everyone aligned.
- Decision quality — your output is not documents. Your output is decisions made, work shipped, and risk surfaced early.
What you bring
- 3–5 years of product management experience, ideally in a startup or fast-moving software environment.
- Direct sprint experience with engineering teams — you've owned a backlog, run standups, and shipped through more than one release cycle.
- Demonstrable AI fluency — you actively use AI tools for specs, mockups, research synthesis, and competitive scans. You can describe specific prompts and workflows that compress hours into minutes.
- Comfort with executive conversations — you've presented to founders or C-level stakeholders and can hold your own when the room pushes back.
- Written communication that survives forwarding — your specs, readouts, and decisions read clearly to people who weren't in the meeting.
- Reliability on a freelance cadence — clear hours, predictable response times, and a track record of finishing what you start.
Bonus, not required
- Experience in healthcare technology, fintech, ad tech, travel, or PE-backed services.
- Direct experience working with multi-agent AI systems or LLM-powered features in production.
- Light technical fluency (SQL, basic API reading, comfort with a Jupyter notebook).
- Prior consulting or agency experience where you billed clients directly.
How we work with you
- Freelance, hourly. Competitive hourly rate, set during the offer conversation based on experience and engagement scope.
- Flexible hours. We care about delivery against milestones and a predictable weekly cadence — not 9-to-5 attendance.
- Location flexible. Remote-first. We work primarily across US and EU time zones; overlap with the client's working hours is what matters.
- Senior operators around you. You're not the most senior person in the room. You're operating alongside the founder, CTO, and CPO, and you get coached on the work that matters.
- Real product, real stakes. The work ships to a real client and is measured against a real milestone. No make-work decks.
- Honest about freelance. We don't pretend hourly is "employment-lite." Engagements flex with client demand. We aim to keep good people utilized, but the relationship is project-based.
How to apply
Email hello@statslateral.com with subject line "Application: Associate Product Manager (Freelance)" and include:
- Resume or LinkedIn URL.
- One product you shipped that you're proud of — link to it, and 2–3 sentences on what you specifically owned.
- One AI workflow you actually use in product work today (the tool, the prompt pattern, the output it replaces).
- Your hourly rate expectation and typical weekly availability.
- Time zone.
We respond to every applicant within 5 business days. First-round screening is a 30-minute working conversation.