Product Manager - Media - Remote

At Pencil, we are driving innovation in advertising technology through our state-of-the-art SaaS product, which harnesses Generative AI to redefine content creation. Our mission is to make AI the default in advertising without replacing creative people. To achieve this, we need to make sure that our technology isn’t just in the hands of big brands - we need to try to help small businesses and creative individuals too.

You’ll own delivery of a program with a hard Phase 1 window (Sept → Dec): turn the contractual scope into a sequenced backlog, keep the milestone gates honest, and coordinate the moving parts — the squad, the internal teams whose surfaces the product plugs into, an external data-API dependency, and the specialists who will operate the product with enterprise brands. The users are media practitioners; the product only lands if its PM understands their craft — how campaigns are planned and trafficked, how product and creative data flow through the ad platforms, what an agency team actually does with a recommendation. You are the person who keeps the build honest to that reality. This is a permanent position: the program is the first mission, not the job’s boundary.

Key responsibilities:

• Own the backlog: every feature framed as a functional outcome with acceptance criteria a domain-literate reader can sign, written at the ticket, before the dev starts. That is how this team works; the PM is its first guardian.

• Sequence a 3-4 month build with the squad’s tech lead, across dependencies on the surrounding Media pod (data engine, agent platform, platform features) and an external data API.

• Run the milestone cadence with program stakeholders: what ships, what’s at risk, what’s descoped — early, in writing.

• Own the design track: brief and coordinate the freelance designer, and keep design scoped to the MVP surfaces.

• Prepare the pilot: onboarding flow for the first enterprise clients, operator playbook with the specialists, measurement plan that can tell an impact story.

Your background:

• Real media-domain knowledge — the non-negotiable: you have worked in or close to paid media, ad platforms or commerce/retail media (agency, brand or ad-tech side), and you can discuss a media specialist’s workflow credibly, in their vocabulary, without an engineer or a strategist translating.

• 3+ years of product management on technical products (platforms, APIs, data or AI products).

• Proven delivery against fixed milestones with external stakeholders — enterprise contracts, client commitments, or equivalent.

• Writing as a core skill: tickets, acceptance criteria, milestone updates.

• Based in Europe, CET working hours.

• Nice to have: LLM products and their evaluation · partner-agency squads · both agency-side and brand-side exposure.

You’ll thrive here if you are…

• You’d rather descope early in writing than slip quietly.

• You think a good acceptance criterion is a product artifact, not paperwork.

• You enjoy being the person who knows why every ticket exists — and what it changes for the media team that will use it.

KPIs/Success metrics:

• Milestone gates met, with risks and descopes surfaced in writing before they bite.

• Ticket quality: acceptance criteria signable by a domain reader without an engineer translating.

• Pilot readiness: first enterprise clients onboarded with a working operator playbook and a measurement plan that can tell an impact story.