Senior Product Manager at Smokeball - Legal Software in Chicago, IL

Job description

• We’re hiring a Senior Product Manager to help rebuild and expand Smokeball’s Personal Injury (PI) offering. This is a hands-on, end-to-end role where you’ll own a PI product area from discovery and strategy through delivery and iteration — working directly with US personal injury firms and our engineering team in Australia.
• You’ll report to the leader of our PI product team and work alongside our other Senior Product Manager, with the two of you sharing ownership of the PI portfolio. You’ll own your roadmap, make the calls on what gets built and why, and be accountable for the impact it delivers. Priorities will move, problems will change, and you’ll need to be comfortable jumping into something new, getting up to speed quickly, talking to customers, and turning messy problems into smart, well-scoped solutions.
• One important thing: don’t come in swinging a redesign hammer. First, get to know the product. Firms rely on what exists today, and the quirks you might spot often exist for a reason. Your first job is to understand the why before deciding what should change.
• We also build with AI in the loop. You should be comfortable using AI tools to design, experiment, and prototype — including Claude Code — and turning ideas into something customers can actually click on and react to. Around here, a good prototype can do a lot of the heavy lifting that a 20-page spec normally would.
• Most importantly, this is a role for a Senior PM who wants to do the craft, not just talk about it. You’ll be in customer calls, sketching flows, building prototypes, making product calls, and getting into the backlog — not watching it all happen from a safe distance.
• This is a hybrid position based in our Chicago, IL office. All Chicagoland employees are required to be in the office on Wednesdays and Thursdays.
• Why this role: Smokeball's PI offering is being substantially rebuilt, and this puts you in the middle of it. You'll start by contributing to the app already shipping, then take ownership of your own area of PI functionality — with direct customer access, fast prototyping tools, and a real path to leading the team as it grows.

Responsibilities

• Build strong relationships with US personal injury firms and our in-house PI attorney to understand workflows, pain points, and market expectations.
• Run customer interviews, usability testing, and validation across your product areas.
• Partner with Sales, Customer Success, and Support to identify recurring customer and commercial problems.
• Develop a deep understanding of the existing PI product and the legal and workflow decisions behind it before proposing changes.
• Own the roadmap for your PI area, prioritizing opportunities based on customer impact, commercial value, and delivery effort.
• Make clear product decisions and trade-offs, and partner with the PI leadership team and other Senior PM to sequence the wider portfolio.
• Represent your product area with executives, customers, Sales, and cross-functional teams.
• Produce your own wireframes and flows during discovery. You don't need to be a designer, but you do need to be self-sufficient. If you do have design experience, that’s a plus.
• Create your own wireframes and user flows during discovery and use AI-assisted tools, including Claude Code, to rapidly build working prototypes for customer validation.
• Treat prototypes as the primary product artifact, keeping documentation focused on intent, behavior, and key requirements rather than exhaustive PRDs.
• Work closely with our Australia-based engineering team, giving them context, priorities, and fast answers. Engineering's role on this team leans toward reviewing, correcting, and hardening what comes out of AI-assisted development, so your prototypes and decisions feed directly into what ships.
• Support planning, backlog refinement, and sprint rituals to keep delivery moving.
• Support launches with Product Marketing, track adoption and customer feedback, and continuously iterate based on real-world usage.

Requirements

• B2B SaaS product management experience, having taken products from problem definition through launch (typically six+ years, though we care more about scope of ownership than tenure)
• Ownership of a product area or portfolio, accountable for roadmap and outcomes — not just feature delivery
• A track record of modernizing or replacing existing functionality with real users on it, not only greenfield work
• Hands-on comfort with AI-assisted design and prototyping, including using Claude Code or similar tools yourself
• Ability to create your own wireframes and prototypes without waiting on a designer
• Experience working effectively with a distant-time-zone engineering team
• Experience collaborating with and mentoring other product managers.
• Strong analytical instincts and excellent communication across levels
• Comfortable collaborating across time zones, with flexibility to join calls with our Australian team.
• Nice to have: experience in legal tech, personal injury, or another document- and deadline-heavy domain; familiarity with Jira, Salesforce, or similar tools.

Skills

Required

• B2B SaaS product management
• Wireframing and prototyping
• Working with distant-time-zone teams
• Mentoring other product managers
• Analytical thinking
• Communication across levels
• Collaboration across time zones

Benefits

• 💵 Competitive Salary
• 💹 Work-Life Balance: 20 vacation days, 3 reboot days, birthday off, volunteer time, and more!
• 🧘 Benefits: Excellent medical, dental, vision coverage. 401(k) match, & monthly wellness stipend
• 👶Parental leave
• 🥡 Office lunch and loads of snacks
• 🧢 And of course...the SWAG!!
• $160k-$180k