Associate Product Manager (APM)

About the Role

As an Associate Product Manager at Peoplebox , you will be responsible for owning and scaling critical product modules that impact how modern organizations manage performance and talent. We are looking for individuals who are highly analytical, technically-sound, and driven by a strong sense of ownership.

You will work closely with the founding team and engineering to solve complex problems, move from 1 to 10 on new initiatives, and optimize existing workflows to deliver a premium user experience.

Key Responsibilities

• Product Discovery : Deeply understand customer pain points through interviews, data analysis, and competitive research.
• End-to-End Execution : Using AI tools create prototypes and mockups, iterate on the same after feedback, and work with engineers to ship high-quality features.
• Data-Driven Decision Making : Define success metrics for your modules and use data to iterate and improve product performance.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration : Act as the bridge between engineering, design, customer success, and sales to ensure product alignment.
• Product Roadmap : Contribute to the long-term vision of the product by identifying high-leverage opportunities for growth.

What We’re Looking For

Essential Qualifications:

• Technical Foundation : A B.Tech/B.E. in Computer Science from a premier institute (IITs, NITs, BITS, or equivalent).
• Analytical Rigor : Ability to break down complex problems into first principles. You should be comfortable with data modeling.
• Product Thinking : A deep empathy for the user. You don't just build features; you solve problems.
• Communication : Ability to articulate technical constraints to designers and business needs to engineers.

Ideal Profile (One of the following):

• The Premier Fresher : You are a top-tier CSE graduate with a passion for product. You have built side projects
• The Dev-turned-PM : You have 1-2 years of experience as a Software Engineer and are now looking to move to a product role

Bonus Points (Good to Have):

• Ex-Founder / Founding Team Member : You have tried to build something from scratch. You understand the "zero to one" grind and have high ownership.

Evaluation Criteria & Interview Process

1. The Product Sense Round (Case Study)

• Objective : Test your ability to design a product from scratch.
• Case : "Design a class/lecture hall management system for a university campus."
• What we look for : User personas, edge cases, prioritization, system thinking, creativity.

2a. The Technical & AI Deep Dive

• Objective : Test your CSE background and ability to use AI to build products.
• Example : "Need to see what they have built using AI"
• What we look for : Understanding of API limits, prompt engineering logic, data security, and system architecture.

2b. The Ownership Round

• Objective : Test for "Ownership"
• What we look for : Stories of grit, ability to handle ambiguity, and alignment