Product Manager

Location: Palo Alto, CA

Department: Product Management

Location: Palo Alto, CA (hybrid)

Small business owners don't have a risk department. They spend their time and energy starting and growing a business. NEXT's mission is to help entrepreneurs thrive, and we're using AI to make business insurance simple, fast, and affordable enough that it never costs them a day of work.

We're an AI technology company that happens to also be a fully licensed insurance carrier. Because we're a full-stack carrier, AI isn't a layer bolted onto someone else's product. It's in the underwriting, the pricing, the classification, and increasingly in how the product itself gets built. We're rebuilding the core judgment loops of a hundreds-of-years old industry, and doing it with a lean team, which is exactly why AI matters.

We underwrite our own risk, build our own systems, and own the entire value chain, so the product decisions made here show up directly in what a customer pays and how fast they get covered. Since 2016 we've insured hundreds of thousands of small businesses across the country. As a subsidiary of Munich Re and ERGO, our growth is backed by the financial strength of one of the world's leading reinsurance and insurance groups.

About the role 

Business Owner's Policy is our flagship product, and this squad owns it. Today it's run by insurance product managers carrying both the insurance and the technology load. We're hiring a PM to take the technology and GTM half: roadmap, technical solutions, delivery, packaging, design, and channel go-to-market. The IPMs stay the authority on the insurance product itself, from underwriting guidelines to new coverages, limits, and industries.

One key part of this job is using AI to grow the product relentlessly. That means AI in the GTM, AI that makes everyone in the squad work more efficiently together, and building tools that help the team build the insurance product itself. We don't care where the leverage comes from. We care that you find it, and that the squad moves faster and the product gets better every month because you're on it, using AI.

You, insurance product managers, along with the rest of the squad carry the same OKRs. That means you're accountable for knowing the insurance product well enough to make sound decisions about how to grow it, not just for shipping what's handed to you. If you want to work on financial products with real revenue (in the $xxxM range), a complex and interesting technical surface, and massive ceiling to change how it continues to get built, this is the job.

What You’ll Do: 

• Drive the roadmap. You are responsible for making sure that sizings get done, and make the long-term versus short-term trade-off explicit rather than implied. You and insurance product managers agree on the plan together; you're ultimately accountable for it
• Ship a true Business Owner’s Policy (BOP) product. Take a bundled product that customers understand and buy in a single flow, and close the distance between what we sell today and what makes a great BOP product
• Own go-to-market with the channels. NEXT distribute our insurance products through 3 channels: Direct, Agent, and Partnership. You will work closely with the cross-functional groups to focus and deliver on a plan of action
• Package and merchandise products. How coverage is presented and packaged to small business owners and to insurance agents are a product decision, and it's yours
• Build a great user experience. Build delightful UX that drives conversion increase and underwriting quality improvements
• Run planning and executive communication. Run product strategy planning and host monthly progress update and strategy discussion session with the executive team 
• Learn insurance. Coverages, appetite, filings, loss ratio and more. You won't be the authority on it, but you will be fluent, and the squad will feel it if you aren't

What We Need: 

• 8+ years in product management, shipping customer-facing products with meaningful revenue attached. Bonus if that product was complex, regulated, or financial, where the details are the hard part
• User obsession backed by ruthless prioritization. You understand your user's pain points well enough to cut the roadmap down to the few things that actually change their experience, and you stay focused on delivering that impact
• Exceptional executive communication. You can compress a complex situation into something a VP and chief executives understand clearly and respond to.
• Direct experience working with distribution channels or GTM teams. You've been the pseudo-PMM for a product before, or close to it
• Comfort building software that sells a complex, regulated, or financial product where the details matters
• A habit of challenging the status quo by getting to the core of a problem, not by having stronger opinions or louder voice than everyone else in the room
• Ability to use AI tools to accelerate and automate your workflows without compromising quality and critical thinking

Unstoppable Qualities: 

• Background in insurance, fintech, lending, or another regulated category.
• Experience selling to small businesses, where the buyer is the owner and the attention span is thirty seconds
• Strong analytical skills and experience. You have deep experience working directly with data, as well as working with data sciences partners 
• Strong design partnership instincts. You brief well and you know when the answer is a UX problem, not a feature.