Associate Product Manager (Graduate) in City of London

Vatix is a profitable, bootstrapped B2B SaaS company, founded in London in 2018, with our engineering team in Kraków from day one. We build a governance, risk and compliance platform that helps organisations deliver operational excellence: risk management, audits and inspections, incident and event management, compliance assurance, and the safety and quality use cases that sit alongside them. It is used by over 800 organisations and more than 75,000 people, including Starbucks, British Airways, Dyson, Intel, Siemens, the Co-op, the NHS, Cambridge University and the University of Oxford.

We are not VC-backed and have no plans to sell. This is a long-term, profitable business growing around 40% year on year, with a clear roadmap and a reputation as an emerging leader in its category. We are around 30 people, 20 of them in product and engineering.

A defining feature of our product is that customers configure it themselves through a no-code builder. That makes the product work unusually interesting. You are not designing one workflow, you are designing the building blocks that organisations use to design their own.

Our product range has outgrown one product manager. Every project and prototype currently runs through him, which makes him the bottleneck on all of them. That is the honest reason we are hiring.

The point of this job is not to assist. It is for you to take modules and areas of the product and own them outright, as early as you can be trusted with them. For the right person that means running your own area inside a year: your own customers, your own analysis, your own decisions about what gets built.

You will report to our Product Manager, who has spent five years building this product and knows this market better than anyone, and you will sit next to him in London. He will mentor you daily. You do not need to have done product management before. We would rather hire someone excellent and teach them product than someone average who has already done it.

Your first few months:

• Own the feedback loop end to end. Support tickets, customer emails, sales calls, call recordings. All of it captured, deduplicated, logged against the right customer and the right project in Linear, with a weekly digest the rest of the company actually reads.
• Build out product analytics. This is an area we are keen to invest in. The instrumentation, the questions worth asking, and the answers. Yours to own.
• Delivery hygiene. Keep the main Linear views honest. Write tickets with proper acceptance criteria. QA the features that matter before customers see them.
• Product communications. Covering release notes and customer-facing product comms when our product manager is away.
• Discovery. Sitting in on customer calls with risk and compliance leads, operations and quality directors, safety managers and IT teams, then running your own as soon as you are ready.
• Prototypes. Simple ones first, then larger, based on what you show you can handle.

The pattern is straightforward. You earn the next thing by doing the last thing well. There is no fixed timetable, which cuts both ways: nothing is held back from you on grounds of tenure, and nothing is handed to you on those grounds either.

This is the part most likely to differ from anywhere else you are considering, so it is worth being clear. We are an AI-first company, and that runs through how this role is delivered. You will use Claude Code every day: to think through and pressure test plans, to interrogate data and size opportunities, and to build working front-end prototypes that customers can click through and react to.

Getting from a customer conversation to something testable in a day is the most valuable emerging skill in product, and very few people have it yet. You will learn it here properly, with someone experienced to support you.

We are not looking for someone who has already mastered this way of working. Almost nobody has. We want someone curious and adaptable, ready to learn new ways of doing things and make them their own. If you see AI tooling as a gimmick, this is not the role for you.

What we are looking for:

• Excellent academics from a strong university. We are not precious about the subject, but we care a great deal that you have done difficult intellectual work to a high standard.
• Quantitative ability you can evidence. A technical or quantitative degree (maths, physics, engineering, computer science, or economics with genuine quantitative content). If your degree is not technical, an A or A* in A-level Maths or the equivalent.
• Strong analytical ability. You can structure a messy problem, reach a defensible answer from imperfect data, and know how much confidence it deserves.
• Exceptional communication, especially in writing. Product work is mostly writing, and unclear writing is a symptom of unclear thinking.
• Genuine enthusiasm for working AI-first. You are already curious about tools like Claude, or visibly itching to work this way.
• Evidence you have built something. A side project, a prototype, a script, an analysis you did because you were curious.
• Comfort with ambiguity and with customers. Nobody will hand you a fully specified task, and you will be on customer calls within your first couple of months.
• Ambition, and the patience to earn it. We are offering real ownership sooner than almost anywhere else will.
• Interest in problems that carry consequences. Governance, risk and compliance is one of the largest and fastest-growing categories in enterprise software.

No product management or SaaS experience required.

If you are weighing this against a graduate scheme:

Some of the strongest applicants will have an offer from a consultancy, a bank, or a large tech graduate programme and will be wondering whether the safe, big-brand name is the better start. Worth being straight about the trade. There is no cohort, no rotation, no structured two-year programme and nowhere to hide. In exchange, you stop preparing analysis for other people's decisions and start making your own, on a product used by more than 75,000 people.

Your work will be visible to everyone here, including the CEO, within weeks. You will also learn to build, which is rapidly becoming the difference between product people who are useful and product people who are expensive.

We are hiring one person for this role. The bar is high and we would rather leave it open than fill it with someone who only nearly clears it.

Practicalities:

• Salary: £45,000
• Location: London office, five days a week. We are in Southwark, a few minutes from London Bridge and Borough
• Start date: As soon as you are able to join us.
• Holiday: 25 days, plus bank holidays
• Health: Private health insurance included
• Pension: Company pension scheme
• Equipment: Your choice of Dell XPS or MacBook Pro, plus the monitors and peripherals you want
• Office: Weekly Ocado deliveries so you can order your breakfast, snacks and drinks
• Off-sites: Two company off-sites a year in Kraków, including our Christmas trip, with conference days built in, plus other opportunities to travel out and work with the engineering team

Process:

• A conversation with our founder and CEO.
• A call with the Product Manager you would work alongside and report to.
• A case study based on a real product problem we have faced, then a discussion of your thinking.
• A final chance to come into the office, meet the team and get a feel for how we work.

We move quickly. If you are ready to move, we can turn the whole process around in as little as five days, and you will always know where you stand. That said, we are looking for the right person rather than the fastest hire, and we will make the time to be sure it is a good fit on both sides.