Director of Product (F/M/X)

About us

At ablefy, we believe passion can turn into a career for anyone. With ablefy.io, we give coaches, consultants, creators, and entrepreneurs everything they need to build and sell digital products online — simply and efficiently. 70,000+ entrepreneurs already trust us to power their business.

Born in 2015, ablefy has grown into a true all-in-one solution — courses, memberships, payments, e-ticketing, and more. We take care of the hard stuff, so our users can focus on what truly matters: growing their business.

Today we're the #1 platform for coaches and creators in the DACH region — and we're not slowing down. That's where you come in.

Our mission; to build software that empowers everyone to start, run and grow a successful digital business - borderless, is supported by our high performance principles that are crucial to our success:

• Radical Collaboration
• Constructive confrontation
• Adaptive execution
• Collective ambition
• Evolving expertise
• Empathetic leadership

About the role

As Director of Product, you own the ablefy product portfolio — everything a creator uses to build and sell, everything a buyer touches, and the commerce engine underneath. You report to the CPTO, sit on the product and technology leadership team alongside Engineering, Design and Data, and own product management end to end.

In short, the job is four things:

• Turn product and innovations into growth. We earn on our customers' success, so product and commercial results are one conversation. You run it in close partnership with our commercial teams, and you are measured by what actually moves the business - not by what shipped.
• One product, one roadmap. One portfolio and one roadmap, where every team's work visibly pays into the same vision — and where all our product teams are building toward it together rather than next to each other.
• Lead the AI transformation of the product. Taking manual work off our customers, and helping them make better decisions — the ones that measurably lift conversion, retention and lifetime value. Running a digital business should take less effort and produce better results.
• Lead the transformation of how we build. Becoming an AI-first product organisation is not a tooling exercise. It changes how discovery is done, how work is specified, and how decisions get made.

Responsibilities

The AI transformation — what we build

• Decide where AI is the right mechanism and where it is not — sometimes a removed step or a clear rule beats a model. Where it is right, it should be how the product works, not a feature bolted on.
• Decide where autonomy is allowed: what an agent may do alone, what needs a human, what stays reversible. Here, an agent acting alone is acting on someone's revenue. How that is surfaced, you answer with Design.
• Treat evaluation, reliability and failure modes as product problems you own. An ambitious AI product without craft underneath it ships demos.
• Make the platform smarter about our customers' businesses, not just faster — the decisions that move conversion, retention and lifetime value. Because we own the transaction, our answers rest on settled facts rather than inferred signals.

The AI transformation — how we work

• Change how a product team operates when writing is no longer the bottleneck: discovery, research synthesis, specification, analysis, prototyping. Prototypes become part of how product decisions are made, not a hand-off to design. Raise your team's fluency measurably, and be someone others in the company learn this from.
• Own the product half of the system we build with. Our engineers work with an agentic development setup, and how well it performs depends as much on the quality of the context it is given — specifications, product decisions, domain knowledge, what "done" means — as on the tooling itself. That half is yours, and it has to get measurably better over time.
• Reshape the work as throughput stops being the constraint — smaller teams, tighter scope per product manager, and a sharper answer to what we deliberately do not build.

Portfolio coherence

• Own how the portfolio holds together. The seams between commerce, checkout, creator tooling and the buyer experience are where our value sits — and they are yours. A portfolio that grew this fast has seams that need an owner; you are it.
• Own the sequence: what we build first, what we build later, what we stop — and defend it to the leadership team and to customers.
• Make coherence visible on a regular cadence: every team's roadmap next to the others, far enough ahead that collisions surface before they cost us. We plan bi-weekly today; the longer view is yours to build.

Commercial outcomes

• Work hand in hand with our commercial teams — sales, marketing and customer success. They hear what customers ask for and where deals are won or lost; that belongs inside the roadmap conversation, not around it.
• Validate before we build. Test demand, find out what customers actually need and what they will pay for, rather than shipping and hoping.
• For anything substantial, define the value proposition, the business case and the success metric before the work starts — and come back afterwards to say whether it paid off.
• Be accountable for whether what we shipped moved the business, not for whether it shipped.

Product craft across the function

• Run a discovery practice that produces validated opportunities rather than opinions, and hold a prioritisation line when the pressure is real.
• Build the metric architecture for a business that earns on customer success — sharp KPIs, honest instrumentation, and the ability to spot a metric that is sending the wrong signal.
• Raise the standard for how product decisions are made, documented and communicated. One standard across the whole function, not one per team.

Team

• Lead, hire, level and develop product managers, and set a product culture that is opinionated, customer-obsessed and evidence-driven.
• Shape how the function is organised beneath you — including how our deep payments and order-to-cash product leadership fits into it.
• Partner with Engineering, Design and Data as equals, not as internal clients.

What We Are Looking For

Product leadership

• You have led product managers directly — hiring, levelling, coaching, honest performance conversations — and people you have led have grown because of it.
• You have held accountability for a portfolio, not a feature area, and you know the difference in practice.
• You can work with a long-tenured expert whose depth in their domain exceeds yours, and make their authority stronger rather than smaller.

Craft and operating discipline

• You have built a discovery and prioritisation practice that survived contact with a fast-moving commercial organisation.
• You write value propositions and business cases that hold up in front of a commercial team — and you go back to check whether the bet paid off.
• You define sharp metrics, notice when a KPI is misleading, and make decisions grounded in evidence without hiding behind it.
• Customer proximity is a habit for you, not a research report you consume.
• You bring structure that makes teams faster, not heavier.

AI-native thinking

• You were responsible for shipping a product for which AI was the primary mechanism rather than an add-on. You can therefore talk specifically about how you evaluated the product, the errors it made in production and the changes you made to prevent regression.
• You have grappled with what changes at the interface when an agent owns a workflow — what stays visible, what a user can override, how confidence and trust are handled.

Judgement and communication

• You think in second-order effects, feedback loops and compounding dynamics, and you update your thinking when the evidence points elsewhere. You do not confuse a roadmap with a commitment to be right.
• One sentence for the leadership team, a full spec for engineering, a narrative the team can act on. You can disagree with senior stakeholders and stay in the room.

Qualifications

Required

• 8+ years in product management, including at least 3 years leading product managers directly with real people responsibility
• Product craft at portfolio level: discovery, prioritisation across multiple teams, and metric systems you would defend in front of a board
• At least one shipped product where AI was the core product mechanism, with a concrete account of evaluation and production failure
• Strong cross-functional leadership across Engineering, Design and Data
• Excellent communication in English

Strongly Preferred

• A clear point of view on how a product organisation itself works differently because of AI — ideally because you have already rebuilt one
• Ownership of complex, multi-sided products: marketplaces, creator tools, community platforms, learning environments or similar
• SaaS platform experience, ideally in creator economy, edtech, e-commerce or B2B2C
• Understanding of monetisation, subscription logic and revenue mechanics from a product lens
• Familiarity with agentic patterns from a product perspective — tool use, retrieval, orchestration, protocols such as MCP. You will not build these; you will partner closely with the engineers who do

Nice to Have

• Strong technical understanding
• Experience at a high-growth startup, Series A–C
• German
• Public contributions to product or AI product thinking — writing, talks, open source

This role is probably not for you if

• You want to own product outcomes yourself. Each team's outcome belongs to its product manager; your job is the system around them.
• You establish coherence through approval rights rather than through visibility.
• You need a large organisation underneath you to be effective. This one is deliberately small.

Why ablefy

We have a large and growing customer base, an engineering organisation that has spent the past year getting the platform genuinely stable, and we own the transaction our customers depend on — which means our product decisions show up directly in their revenue and in ours.

We are not planning to grow the division. We are rebuilding what it does: same number of people, a very different portfolio. That makes prioritisation the real work, not a slide.

What we do not yet have is one person holding the whole product together and setting the standard for how it is built. That is this role. If you want portfolio-level ownership, a leadership team that will argue with you properly, and the mandate to define what an AI-native platform looks like in the creator economy — this is it.

Benefits

• Paid time off – 30 vacation days.
• A competitive salary.
• A personal training and development budget of €1,500 per year.
• Responsibility and trust from day one.
• Individual coaching and further training to support you in your development.
• A free BVG ticket.
• Employee discounts at numerous companies (e.g. at the gym or in online stores).
• Pension program with company match up to 30% of employee contributions.
• A culture of equity and inclusion where you are appreciated for the person you are.

Diversity & Inclusion

At ablefy, we embrace our differences, as they are our greatest strength. We recognize that everyone has a unique perspective based on their experiences, identities, and thought processes, and we strive to create an inclusive environment for all. Discrimination based on race, religion, color, national origin, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability status, or any other aspect that makes you unique is not tolerated at ablefy. We aim to make growth accessible to everyone!

We know that no candidate checks every single box, and that’s okay! If you’re excited about this role and think you can bring something valuable to our team, we encourage you to apply—even if you don’t meet every requirement. We’d love to hear from you!

AI at ablefy

As an AI-first company, we put intelligent technology at the heart of everything we do. AI is part of how we build, learn, and grow together. It helps us work smarter, move faster, and focus on creating real impact. We believe the strongest results come from combining thoughtful technology with curious, driven people — and we’re excited to shape what’s next, together.