Job Description for Lead Product Manager - Editor - EMEA at Pencil - Remote (EMEA)
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, and that tension is the job. These formats demand deep fidelity — colour profiles, rendering engines, retailer and ad-server specs. At the same time, our agents (Scribble) are doing more and more of the production work. Your job is the seam: how does a human direct an agent instead of pushing pixels? What does craft mean when generation does the assembly?
You'll share the editor suite with a peer Lead PM who owns multi-format editing for digital and 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 — what you shipped, what happened, what you'd do differently.
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. If your instinct is to start with a demo, this isn't the role.
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, iterating quickly, and fixing things before they become fires;
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, not just outputs. You 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, especially in the last mile of polish and usability.
KPIs & Success Measures
We'll measure success through outcomes and quality, not just output:
Touchless rate in new formats: share of print, email, PDP, and HTML5 variants receiving zero manual edits after generation. The lead metric — same bar as the core editor, applied where nobody's hit it.
Import fidelity: share of Figma/PSD imports arriving edit-ready without manual repair.
Export fidelity: share of exports accepted first time by their destination — press-ready PDF/X passing pre-flight, email rendering correctly across major clients, HTML5 passing ad-server validation, PDP assets meeting retailer specs.
Feeds scale in new formats: feeds-originated generations and average variants per template for print, email, PDP, and HTML5.
Native build: share of print/email/PDP/HTML5 templates built natively in the editor vs imported.
Reliability (hygiene bar): crash rate, regressions — a floor, not a goal.
Learning velocity (supporting): every launch audited at L+14 against its stated hypothesis.
Benefits:
25 days PTO plus public holidays, although we operate a Flexible Time Off scheme
Health insurance / private medical cover
Monthly stipend towards wellness, fitness, and learning and development
Remote - work from anywhere in your home country
Enhanced parental leave policies, whether you become a parent through birth, adoption or surrogacy
Access to our Pencil office in The Shard, London for our UK employees
Flexible working hours
Deep Dive About Pencil
Pencil uses AI to make ads. Our mission is to make marketing effective and effortless. We want to become the default way ads get made - because AI ads are 10x faster and cheaper to make, and 2x better performing, than making them without AI.
We're called Pencil because we believe AI will be a tool for creative people, not a replacement - it may even be as fundamental a tool in the future as the pencil was in the past.
Pencil was founded in 2018 with a team from Google, Facebook and Uber with backing from Sequoia and Entrepreneur First. We were acquired by The Brandtech Group in 2023 to pursue a shared vision of bringing GenAI to the Fortune 500.
About The Brandtech Group
The Brandtech Group's mission is to be the best company in the world at helping leading global brands drive growth by connecting content, data and media using technology.
It was founded in June 2015 (as You & Mr Jones) by former Havas Global CEO David Jones, with a simple mission to help brands do their marketing better, faster and cheaper using technology. It was renamed The Brandtech Group in January 2022.
Today it generates more than $1BN in revenue and is the largest global digital content partner for many of the world's biggest brands and companies, often using its unique in-housing model. It works with eight of the world's top 10 global advertisers and 49 of the world's top 100. Clients include Banco Itaú, Danone, Google, Intuit, LVMH, Microsoft, Morgan-Stanley, Netflix, Reckitt, Renault-Nissan, PayPal, TikTok, Uber and Unilever.
In addition, the Group invests in cutting-edge technology companies relevant to and with potential in marketing and has been investing in the AI, AR and the metaverse space since 2015. The Group was the first external investor in Niantic (creators of Pokémon Go), alongside investments in AI Foundation (AI digital twins, personalized AI, and deep-fake detection 2018), Automat (AI chatbots, 2016), Elsy (AI media planning, 2016), Jivox (dynamic automated content, 2016), Crossing Minds (deep learning AI recommendation system, 2017), CreativeX (AI-driven content optimization, 2022), Zappar (AR, 2017), Provenance (blockchain, 2022) and GGP (the world's largest gaming fund).
The Group is one of the most prominent marketing industry voices on the prediction and movement to AI-driven marketing, including Generative AI. It was named one of the World's Most Innovative Companies 2021 by Fast Company, and by CB Insights as one of the World's Most Valuable Private Unicorns.
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