Product Tech Lead

Join to apply for the Product Tech Lead (all genders) role at Open Project

At Open Project, we build open source project management software that helps teams plan, collaborate, and deliver work more effectively. We believe great software should empower people to organize work in a way that supports autonomy, accountability, and collaboration across boundaries.

As Product Tech Lead
, you’ll play a key role in turning that vision into reality. You’ll bridge software engineering, product management, and leadership by guiding your team of software engineers to create a product that is both technically sound and deeply aligned with user needs. Your goal is to bring clarity while focusing on what truly matters, especially when the path forward isn’t fully defined.

• Own new product initiatives end-to-end from problem definition to launch, including user research, concept development, validation, implementation, roll‑out, and continuous improvement.
• Shape the roadmap, evaluate and prioritize ideas based on company strategy, and regularly present and discuss the roadmap with the product management team.
• Bridge disciplines: think like a product manager, act like an engineer. Translate between users, clients, and your team to ensure real needs are met.
• Build quick prototypes yourself and work closely with engineers and stakeholders inside and outside your team.
• Communicate clearly and proactively, especially in a remote‑first environment, tailoring your communication to different audiences.
• Collaborate across functions: align with Sales, Marketing, UX/UI, QA, and leadership to ensure shared understanding and coordinated delivery.
• Contribute your own approaches and lessons learned from past product development experiences.

• Proven experience building and launching digital products end‑to‑end with lessons learned from real product successes and failures.
• A strong product mindset – you care deeply about why and for whom you build, not just what you build.
• Senior‑level experience in software engineering, ideally with Ruby on Rails, building and maintaining complex web applications across the full stack.
• Experience applying product management methodologies and practices such as agile, user research, design thinking, or rapid prototyping.
• The ability to quickly prototype ideas and collaborate with developers on equal footing.
• Strong written communication skills to make complex ideas easy to grasp and fluency in English as our business language is a must‑have. Ideally, you’re also fluent in German.
• Leadership that fosters psychological safety, constructive challenge, and DEIB principles.
• Curiosity, openness to experimentation, and willingness to engage in thoughtful, sometimes passionate, discussions with peers.

• The best of both worlds: the creative challenges and learning opportunities of a start‑up combined with the financial stability of a “grown‑up” company in a team of dedicated professionals.
• The flexibility to decide where you would like to work: remotely in a location within two hours (time‑zone) from Berlin, Germany.
• Contributing to an open source project with high visibility and transparency within the developer world (our software code is freely available on Github).
• Working with a team of experienced software engineers in continuous delivery and integration processes who love to learn from each other.
• Once a year, we dedicate our "Passion Time" off‑site to work on any improvements of our choice with a business impact (e.g. product improvements, marketing concepts,…) in multi‑disciplinary teams.
• Employee benefits such as job bikes and paid child care.
• Interaction with exciting clients and users from all around the globe, including NGOs and other open source projects such as Greenpeace, Engineers without Frontiers, corporates like Siemens, Deutsche Bahn or Audi, and public institutions like German Federal Ministries.

• our company and product: openproject.org
• our code:
• our employee and candidate satisfaction:  or

Still have some questions before applying? Don’t hesitate to reach out to us ().