Head of Product Management and

Holly is the HR platform built for city and county government. We help local governments modernize how they hire, classify, and manage their workforce — work that directly shapes public services for millions of people. Our platform is live across 12 states with 60+ jurisdictions representing over 10% of the US population, including major counties like Santa Clara and Contra Costa in the Bay Area, Orange County in LA, and Snohomish County in Washington State. Demand is outpacing our team, and we're building to meet it.

Holly is a seed‑stage team of 20+ operators with deep roots in public service, civic tech, and AI. We’ve raised $10M from leading investors in government technology and the future of work and have grown over 100X in the last year. We center public servants and impact in every decision and we bring that same care to how we work here at Holly.

We're hiring Holly's Founding Product Manager as we build out Holly's core platform.

You’ll report directly to Cherie, co‑founder of Holly, and own new modules end‑to‑end — from the first whiteboard session through shipped product. (Your fingerprints will be on the most consequential parts of what Holly builds next.

Shepherd features from idea to shipped product, owning scope and sequence decisions end‑to‑end, and doing anything and everything to unblock teams.

Co‑own the product metrics that define whether a feature is working — adoption, engagement, time saved — and use them to decide what to double down on or cut.

Talk directly to our customers. Work closely with customers and subject matter experts to understand costing, grievances, negotiation, MOUs backwards and forwards so you can spot where the real pain lives and which features would actually move the needle.

Build and maintain user personas that sharpen how the whole team understands government HR users — and use them to form hypotheses worth testing.

Lead how Holly uses AI for product development (~20% of time).

Help build AI into the product from the ground up, outlining AI‑powered features to solve old problems in novel ways.

Build internal tooling, reusable skills, or interesting automations that level up the team — everything from managing personal to‑dos to doing QA to ideating on new features.

Own AI quality. Write, test, and maintain the production system prompts behind Holly's AI features, and define how we measure “good” — building eval sets from real examples and iterating against them, not vibes.

This is an AI‑native, zero‑to‑one product role on a small team building for government. The strongest candidates pair real product‑building experience with hands‑on AI fluency — people who turn AI into shipped product, not just decks — and feel the pull of the mission.

Founder DNA — you’ve built something from zero, whether it’s your own company, product, or team, and know how to operate without a complete spec or a lot of structure. B2B enterprise, legacy SaaS, or deployment‑heavy software background — you’re comfortable with complex workflows, real implementations, and customers who depend on the software to do their jobs.

Curious and collaborative — you question things deeply, work through opinions in the open, then translate the discussion into a conclusion and ship.

Comfortable with data ‑ you can get into the numbers yourself to find a signal, size a problem, or check whether a feature is working.

Drawn to the mission — demonstrated interest in public sector / social impact. AI fluency — you reach for AI by default, are always testing new tools, and bring the rest of the team along.

AI as a force‑multiplier — you already use AI daily for research synthesis, data analysis, competitive teardowns, and drafting specs, and you can wire messy inputs (spreadsheets, PM tools, meeting notes) into reusable workflows that produce consistent, actionable outputs — briefs, analyses, tickets — not just summaries.

You can use AI tools to write code — you understand code syntax, data structures, and how to prompt tools like Claude Code or Cursor effectively. You can produce production‑ready code for simple UX changes yourself, and you know when to hand off more complex work to our engineering team.

Direct impact - the modules you own will be used by government HR teams serving millions of citizens.

Shape the product team — as an early product hire, help build the team, practices, and culture as it grows — setting how product gets done at Holly.

At the frontier of AI‑native product — build on a team that treats AI as the default, with room to work hands‑on with the best tools in the market and help define what AI‑native product development actually looks like.

140,000 - $160,000 USD base with equity, comprehensive health benefits (platinum plan with vision and dental), 401(k) match, and a professional development stipend.

We’re an early‑stage startup serving government clients with real deadlines, and many of our largest customers are on the West Coast. We care about ownership and outcomes, not clock‑watching, but want to be transparent that this is a high‑intensity role with long days and long hours (~60‑65 a week), and the occasional fire drill around launches or critical issues.

Travel.

Roughly quarterly to customers. Expect quarterly travel for in‑person user research with government HR teams, most often in California, where many of our largest clients are based.

Holly is committed to building a diverse company and working with the broadest talent pool possible. We encourage applications from all races, religions, national origins, genders, sexual orientations, gender identities, gender expressions, and ages, as well as veterans and individuals with disabilities.