Lead Product Manager - Editor

At Pencil, we are driving innovation in advertising technology through our state-of-the-art SaaS product, which harnesses Generative AI to redefine content creation. Our mission is to make AI the default in advertising without replacing creative people. To achieve this, we need to make sure that our technology isn't just in the hands of big brands — we need to try to help small businesses and creative individuals too.

The Role

Most of the world's marketing creative is still produced with workflows that predate AI. Print runs assembled by hand. Emails coded by hand. Product pages and HTML5 ads versioned by hand, one at a time. These formats — worth billions of assets a year — haven't seen the AI transformation that's already reshaping digital. Pencil is building the agentic system that changes this, and this role owns the frontier.

You'll lead the editor for print, email, PDP, HTML5, and other emerging formats: the surfaces where generations become shippable creative in the media AI hasn't yet touched. You'll also lead import and export across the suite — the pipelines that carry work in from Figma, PSD, and legacy tooling, and out to pre-press, ESPs, retailers, and ad servers. Import/export is where creative intent survives contact with the real world, and it's the backbone of every format we ship.

The role holds a tension: these formats demand deep fidelity (colour profiles, rendering engines, retailer and ad-server specs), while our AI agents (Scribble) are doing more and more of the production work. Your job is to define how a human directs an agent instead of pushing pixels, and what craft means when generation does the assembly.

You'll share the editor suite with a peer Lead PM who owns multi-format editing for digital feeds and sheets. You own the charter for new formats and import/export end-to-end — problem, metrics, scope.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the charter for new formats and import/export: the durable problem, success metrics, and an explicit in/out scope list.
• Define how the editor integrates with Pencil's agentic framework — templates that agents can populate at scale, and review-and-refine workflows that keep humans in control.
• Take AI transformation into print, email, PDP, and HTML5: formats with deep domain constraints where nobody has shipped the answer.
• Lead import and export across the editor suite: high-fidelity import from Figma, PSD, and legacy tooling; export that meets the bar of pre-press, ESPs, retailer platforms, and ad servers.
• Identify the highest-impact improvements that push touchless rate up and last-mile effort down, so users finish and export work confidently.
• Define the product contract between generation and manual editing: predictable, controllable, reversible, and empowering.
• Run the full lifecycle: Discovery through post-launch audit, with a written hypothesis before every ship and an L+14 review after it.
• Use product data and structured customer feedback to validate priorities — working backwards from evidenced customer need, always.
• Partner daily with a principal designer on craft, and with the PMs building Scribble on the agentic seam.
• Partner with your peer Lead PM on shared editor foundations so the suite stays coherent while each format meets its own bar.

Your Background

You might be a great fit if you can walk us through:

• A 0-1 product or a major transformation of an existing one, where you owned the outcome end-to-end.
• A product where design craft was the differentiator, not a polish layer.
• A time you built from validated customer need in a domain you had to go learn.
• A decision you changed because the data told you to — fluent in qual and quant, both.
• Shipping nuanced, high-quality UX in technically complex systems (editors, creation tools, or AI-assisted workflows).

You'll Thrive Here If You...

• Move Fast: You're comfortable making decisions with imperfect information and iterating quickly.
• Stay Human: You care deeply about users and teammates, and design with empathy for real workflows.
• Act Like an Owner: You take responsibility for outcomes, spot problems early, and take initiative to fix them.
• Keep It Simple: You fight unnecessary complexity, design reusable patterns, and make hard things feel intuitive.
• Love to Surprise: You enjoy finding unexpected ways to delight users in the last mile of polish and usability.

Success Measures

• Touchless rate in new formats: Share of print, email, PDP, and HTML5 variants receiving zero manual edits after generation.
• Import fidelity: Share of Figma/PSD imports arriving edit-ready without manual repair.
• Export fidelity: Share of exports accepted first time by destination specs (press-ready PDF/X, email client rendering, HTML5 ad-server validation, retailer specs).
• Feeds scale in new formats: Feeds-originated generations and average variants per template.
• Native build: Share of templates built natively in the editor vs imported.
• Reliability: Crash rate and regression tracking.
• Learning velocity: Auditing every launch at L+14 against its stated hypothesis.

Benefits

• 25 days PTO plus public holidays (Flexible Time Off scheme available)
• Health insurance / private medical cover
• Monthly stipend for wellness, fitness, and learning & development
• Remote position (work from anywhere in your home country within EMEA)
• Enhanced parental leave policies (birth, adoption, surrogacy)
• Flexible working hours
• Access to Pencil office in The Shard, London (for UK employees)