Product Controller

Product Controller ABOUT PLANE Plane is an incisive response to config-heavy, opinionated, and restrictive project management software. Read our manifesto https://plane.so/manifesto. In just two years, Plane has grown to #1 in its category on GitHub and become a viable open-core alternative to Jira, Monday, Wrike, Asana, ClickUp, and Linear. Our growth has come on the back of the product’s true flexibility without artificial limits, simple configurations that work out of the box, and thoughtfully packaged features that nurture our customers’ growth instead of punishing it. As a modern product start-up, we obsess over new and power users equally. Our mission is to empower teams everywhere with the simplest, most delightful work management experience on the planet. Our vision is to become the WorkOS of the future with a workbench of unified tools and techniques that intuitively and progressively form a greater whole for knowledge workers. ABOUT THE ROLE THE PRODUCT CONTROLLER Air traffic controllers don't fly planes and they don't build runways — but nothing moves without them. They hold the full picture, sequence priorities, resolve conflicts in real-time, and route traffic across multiple vectors simultaneously. That's what this role is. At Plane, the Product Controller owns both the what and the how of product execution. You hold the roadmap in one hand and the execution plan in the other, and your job is to make sure every team — engineering, design, infrastructure — is cleared for takeoff, routed correctly, and landing on time. This isn't a project manager who chases status updates. This isn't a product manager who writes specs and hands them off. This is someone who sits at the intersection of product thinking and operational coordination, maintaining real-time situational awareness across the entire system of work. We're a team of fewer than 20 building against companies with thousands. The person in this role doesn't get to specialize — they have to hold the full picture and make it all move coherently. WHAT YOU'LL DO HOLD THE PICTURE, MOVE THE WORK Own situational awareness — maintain a live mental model of everything in motion: what's being built, what's blocked, what's about to collide, and what's coming over the horizon. When someone asks "where are we on X?", you don't check — you already know. Sequence and prioritize across teams — when two priorities compete for the same engineering bandwidth or a design dependency threatens a release timeline, you make the call. You don't escalate ambiguity — you resolve it. Route work across boundaries — manage transitions from product thinking to design exploration to engineering implementation to release. Make sure the right context arrives with the right work at the right team at the right time. No dropped context, no orphaned decisions. Shape what gets built — synthesize user feedback, competitive signals, community requests, and technical constraints into clear product direction. Write the spec when a spec is needed, skip the spec when a 5-minute conversation will do. Know the difference. Protect team throughput — push back on scope creep, flag unrealistic timelines before they become crises, and actively remove blockers. Treat the team's focus as a finite resource and defend it. Coordinate releases end-to-end — from feature definition through QA, documentation, changelog, and release notes. Own the entire surface area of getting a thing from idea to shipped and communicated. Bridge community and product — we're open-source. Our GitHub issues, Discord, and community channels are a live signal of what users need. You translate that signal into action without letting volume override judgment. WHAT A TYPICAL WEEK MIGHT LOOK LIKE - Running a lightweight daily sync that gives every team exactly the context they need and nothing more. - Making a real-time call to re-sequence a sprint when a critical customer issue surfaces. - Sitting with a designer and an ... (truncated, view full listing at source)