Product Delivery Lead — Launch Readiness
1 day ago
Oakland
Product Delivery Lead — Launch Readiness Company: Gametime Hero Location: Remote Type: Contract, part-time Hours: 20 hours/week to start, with potential to increase to 25–35 hours/week Duration: 3 months, with potential extension Compensation: $30–$45/hr depending on experience About Gametime Hero Gametime Hero helps organizers run active communities — from recurring events and RSVPs to forms, waivers, payments, tournaments, coaching, and public community sites. We launched early, learned from real users, and have spent the last year building out the core platform. Many of our major features are now working and being used, but we are entering an important new phase: making the product more reliable, tested, polished, documented, and ready for broader adoption. We are looking for a Product Delivery Lead to help us turn a live early-stage product into a launch-ready platform. This is a hands-on execution role for someone who can bring structure to a fast-moving startup environment. The Role As Product Delivery Lead, you will help coordinate our launch-readiness process across several major product areas, including: • Events and RSVPs, • Forms, waivers, and submissions, • Public sites, • Communities, • Tournaments, • Coaching tools, • Payments and organizer workflows Your job is to help us answer, every week: • What is working?, • What is broken?, • What has been tested?, • What is blocked?, • Who owns each feature?, • What is ready for users?, • What needs more QA before launch?, • What do founders or engineers need to decide? This is not a traditional corporate product manager role. You will not be joining to write long strategy documents or own product vision in isolation. You will be joining to help the team ship, test, organize, and prepare features for real-world use. What You’ll Do Own the launch-readiness process • Create and maintain launch-readiness checklists for major product areas, • Define what “Alpha Ready,” “Beta Ready,” and “Launch Ready” mean for each feature, • Track feature status across product, engineering, QA, and founder priorities, • Help us identify what is truly ready versus what only appears done, • Run go/no-go reviews before features are shown to more users Coordinate weekly delivery • Run weekly sprint planning and progress check-ins, • Break product goals into clear tasks, owners, and acceptance criteria, • Track blockers, open questions, bugs, and missing requirements, • Make sure the team knows what needs to happen next, • Prepare weekly founder updates showing progress, risk, and launch status Support interns and junior team members • Help coordinate 6 software developer interns and 1 QA intern, • Make sure each intern has a clear product area, weekly deliverables, and definition of done, • Help turn intern work into real product progress, • Follow up on blockers and missed handoffs, • Help identify the strongest interns for future technical or solutions engineering roles Partner with QA • Work with the QA intern to create test plans for each feature, • Make sure happy paths, edge cases, permissions, mobile flows, and regression paths are tested, • Track bugs by severity: P0, P1, P2, and P3, • Make sure bugs are retested before features are marked ready, • Help us avoid calling features “done” before they are actually usable Improve product operations • Create lightweight systems for tracking feature status, bugs, QA notes, support docs, and launch notes, • Keep documentation simple, useful, and up to date, • Help create repeatable processes without slowing the team down, • Bring order to ambiguity without adding unnecessary bureaucracy What Success Looks Like First 30 Days • Every major product area has an owner, status, and launch-readiness checklist, • Interns have clear weekly deliverables, • QA has a repeatable testing process, • Founders receive a weekly delivery report, • The team has a clear view of what is ready, what is blocked, and what needs testing First 60 Days • Major features have completed structured QA passes, • P0 and P1 issues are clearly tracked and reduced, • Product areas are moving from “working” to “beta ready”, • Intern output is connected to actual launch-readiness goals, • The team has a reliable weekly rhythm First 90 Days • Key Gametime Hero features are launch ready or clearly scoped for beta, • Support notes and QA records exist for shipped features, • The team has a repeatable launch-readiness process, • Founders know what is ready to sell, demo, onboard, and support You Should Apply If • You are good at turning chaos into a checklist, • You like helping teams move from “almost working” to “ready”, • You are comfortable working in early-stage startup ambiguity, • You can coordinate developers, QA, founders, and product priorities, • You know the difference between “code is merged” and “users can actually use this”, • You are direct, organized, calm, and reliable, • You can push for clarity without creating unnecessary drama, • You care about quality, follow-through, and user experience Requirements • 2+ years of experience in product operations, project management, program management, delivery management, QA coordination, startup operations, or a related role, • Experience working with software teams, • Strong written communication, • Strong organization and follow-through, • Ability to manage multiple workstreams at once, • Comfortable creating tickets, checklists, launch plans, QA plans, and weekly status updates, • Comfortable working with junior developers, interns, contractors, or cross-functional teams, • Familiarity with tools like Linear, Jira, Trello, Notion, GitHub, Slack, or similar Nice to Have • Experience with early-stage startups, • Experience helping a live product move from beta to launch readiness, • Experience with SaaS, community platforms, marketplaces, events, sports tech, or creator tools, • Experience with QA workflows and release management, • Basic understanding of web apps, user roles, permissions, forms, payments, and event workflows, • Experience coordinating interns or junior team members You Are Probably Not a Fit If • You need a mature company process already in place, • You only want to work on high-level product strategy, • You avoid follow-up and accountability, • You are uncomfortable telling founders when something is not ready, • You need every requirement perfectly defined before taking action, • You think “done” means the code was merged Example Projects You’ll Own • Create launch-readiness checklists for Events, Forms, Sites, Tournaments, Communities, and Coaching, • Coordinate QA testing for recurring events, RSVPs, capacity, waitlists, forms, and organizer workflows, • Create a weekly launch-readiness dashboard for founders, • Help assign interns to specific feature areas and weekly outcomes, • Track bugs, blockers, and product decisions across multiple workstreams, • Prepare support notes for features that are ready for organizer use, • Help decide which features are ready for beta users, demos, or broader launch How to Apply Send us: 1. Your resume or LinkedIn, 2. A short note explaining why this role fits you, 3. An example of a project, release, launch, or team process you helped organize, 4. Your hourly rate and weekly availability Bonus: include a simple example of a launch-readiness checklist, QA process, or delivery dashboard you have used or would create. About This Opportunity This is a strong fit for someone who wants meaningful ownership in an early-stage startup. Gametime Hero is already live with real users. We are not starting from zero. But we are honest about where we are: we built quickly, learned from the market, and now need stronger systems for quality, QA, delivery, and launch readiness. • If you like helping teams turn a promising live product into something reliable, organized, and ready for growth, this role is for you.