Product and Community Lead

We are looking for a Product and Community Lead to ensure that the communities that 2i2c serves are empowered to have the most impact with our infrastructure.

Position summary #

This role will guide and empower the communities that we serve, learn from them, and bring their perspective to guide our service and product development. It is similar to a mixture of product management and community and developer advocacy in a tech firm, but adjusted for research, education, and open source contexts. It is also similar to a Research Applications Manager, but with a focus on using and developing infrastructure.

The skills required are a combination of communication, teaching, learning, service design and delivery, and technical acumen. The person that fills this role should feel comfortable learning and sharing ideas, empowering and guiding others, and communicating clearly and collaboratively with a variety of stakeholders including end-users and engineers.

This is a leadership role for a strategy-minded practitioner. 2i2c is a young organization, and this role will have a large degree of autonomy and flexibility. We have defined the starting point, but we seek someone who can bring a strategic eye to this position. Over time we hope that the role will grow to define and lead this style of work within 2i2c more broadly.

What you’ll do #

This role is a combination of connecting, guiding, leading, learning, communicating, and empowering stakeholders in the communities we serve, as well as the 2i2c engineering team. Here are some key focus areas with core responsibilities under each:

Guiding and learning from communities we serve #

Our users are often not “power-users” with Jupyter, open source workflows, or cloud-native workflows. This role should work with users of these communities to guide them in using our infrastructure for maximal impact. Below are a few example responsibilities:

Understand the goals and needs of the communities we serve, as well as the major pain points and problems that they have. This understanding may not be directly communicated and will be gained through active observation. For example:

• Create and engage in spaces for sharing information with users. For example, online forums and live community discussions.
• Engage in community-specific spaces. This role may monitor and participate in community spaces in either research or education (e.g., the Pangeo forum, the Jupyter forum, or forums for education communities) to track relevant conversation and provide guidance as-needed.

Guide communities and their leaders for the use-cases that 2i2c wishes to enable, and how our infrastructure (Jupyter, JupyterHub, open source tools, etc) can be used to have the most impact. For example:

• Develop user-facing materials (documentation, workshops, talks, etc) that demonstrate the basic use-cases that we support, and the best ways that the infrastructure can be used to accomplish community goals. For example “Teaching with Jupyter” or “An Introduction to Scalable Computing with Dask.”
• Provide one-on-one or group guidance to our user communities (particularly leaders in those communities) with the goal of transferring knowledge that they can then share within their peers.

Foster deeper external relationships and engagements with key communities of practice and partners that are important for 2i2c’s strategy, such as the Pangeo Project (which is a key stakeholder for this role).

• Engage with potential communities and stakeholders, with a focus on demonstrating the use-cases we hope to support and generating new service contracts with these communities.
• Communicate externally to demonstrate impact. For example, by participating in meetings, conferences, and other events where we have an opportunity to highlight the work that 2i2c does.
• Interact extensively with open source communities that underlie our infrastructure, potentially serving in leadership roles and doing significant work to support these communities. There will be a particular focus on the Jupyter and PyData ecosystems.

Guide product and service design and implementation #

This role should understand the perspectives of our users and the use-cases we wish to enable, and bring this perspective to guide the evolution of our services and infrastructure. Below are a few example responsibilities:

Represent user communities and communicate their needs to the engineering team, leadership team, and other stakeholders. For example:

• Discuss and shape ideas for development in collaboration with the engineering and sustainability teams within 2i2c. This may entail writing design documents and participating in GitHub issues and Pull Requests.
• Discuss and shape how to evolve our services. Beyond focused development, this role should also help shape our strategic plan for evolving our service offerings, or designing services for new use-cases.

Coordinate with and guide our team in implementation as we carry out development and service design. For example:

• Participate in team planning meetings and practices. For example, prioritization and planning in GitHub Issues, or in synchronous team meetings.
• Collaborate with engineers throughout the implementation of enhancements to our infrastructure. For example, providing ongoing check-ins, guidance, and feedback via GitHub issues.

Strategic leadership #

This is the first position of its kind within 2i2c, and it will have freedom to shape its strategy and role with the organization. It should oversee the evolution and growth of this kind of work within 2i2c, and develop organizational strategy for how to maximize our impact. Below are a few ways that this might occur (both independently and in partnership with others at 2i2c):

• Develop a product and service culture that balances intuition, community research, and data to create delightful experiences and maximize our impact.
• Define key goals and evaluation criteria for the success of our communities, and work with others at 2i2c to measure and refine these goals, communicate our impact internally, and use this experience to refine our team processes and strategy.
• Develop an organizational strategy for how 2i2c should grow its service and community engagement operations over time, including making new hires, defining new roles, and defining interconnections between these roles and the broader 2i2c team.
• Develop a communications plan that communicates 2i2c’c impact and positions 2i2c as a leading advocate for community-owned interactive computing infrastructure.
• Collaborate around sustainability and stakeholder engagement. 2i2c aims to sustain itself through a combination of paid services, grants, and stakeholder partnerships. This role will collaborate with others at 2i2c in defining and carrying out these efforts.

Relevant Skills & Career Goals #

Below are several skills that will make somebody well-suited for this role. There is significant scope to develop new skills and grow in the role, and some flexibility in emphasizing different aspects of the role based on the applicant’s skill sets and interests.

• Experience with community management and engagement, with a focus on teaching and sharing knowledge with others.
• Experience with product management and guidance, with a focus on collaboration with engineering teams at both a design and an implementation level.
• Experience with technical communication and documentation skills.
• Experience at strategic development and building organizations or teams (particularly distributed or technology-focused ones).
• Experience with data science workflows in research, education, and scholarship, with a focus on open workflows and FAIR principles.
• Experience using an open source language in a research/education setting.
• An interest in learning about workflows with the open source language Python, and open source workflows around it for research and education.
• Experience or strong interest in cloud infrastructure and data workflows for research or education, and how this can lead to more collaboration, openness, and productivity (for example, via managed services and Analysis Ready, Cloud Optimized datasets).
• Experience with distributed and complex open source communities and ability to communicate and collaborate effectively with these communities.

A note on scope and expectations #

We know that this role is very broad in scope, and that there is a lot of room for interpretation of the specific responsibilities and duties. This is somewhat intentional, and somewhat unavoidable, given that this is the first role of its kind within 2i2c. We will do everything we can to set these expectations intentionally, and to refine them as we learn more, in order to reduce this ambiguity and ensure that this role is sustainable.