Noisy Creek is building the technology backbone that powers independent local media and community-building services across a growing portfolio of dynamic markets — including The Stranger in Seattle, Portland Mercury , Chicago Reader, Memphis Flyer , EverOut Events & Ticketing, Noisy Creek Podcasts, Noisy Creek Productions, and more. As we expand our strategy into new revenue streams and cities, we need a leader who can turn a patchwork of publishing, membership, and ticketing tools into a coherent, scalable technical product strategy.
The Head of Technical Product will own the vision, roadmap, and execution for Noisy Creek's core technology stack — spanning our CMS and publishing platform, subscriber and member identity, CRM, advertising technology, and ticketing systems. This is a hands-on, high-ownership role: you'll set technical product strategy at the executive level while staying close enough to the details to write a clear spec, evaluate a vendor contract, or unblock an integration.
You'll partner daily with content, advertising, membership, and events leaders across all Noisy Creek brands, and with external vendors and platform partners, to make sure our technology serves both readers and the business as we scale from a single-market operation into a multi-locale multimedia company. You will make build-vs-buy calls, own vendor relationships, and be accountable for whether our technical bets pay off.
This role has direct involvement at the company's C-suite level, working closely with executive leadership to set and defend technical product strategy as a company-wide priority.
Key Responsibilities
- Define and own the multi-year technical product vision and roadmap across Noisy Creek's publishing, membership, ticketing, and advertising technology stack — and translate that vision into a prioritized, resourced execution plan.
- Lead the strategy, selection, and optimization of the core platform stack, including the CMS/publishing platform (Newspack), subscription and membership management (Piano), CRM and marketing automation (HubSpot), ad tech (Broadstreet), and app publishing (Pugpig), across current and future markets.
- Own reader and member identity architecture across all Noisy Creek brands — enabling a unified view of subscribers, members, and donors, and powering personalization, retention, and B2B CRM use cases.
- Partner with arts, retail, and hospitality partners to scale Noisy Creek's membership program, prioritizing fraud mitigation, real-time redemption tracking, and instant issuance of dozens of partner perks a month across our footprint of cities.
- Evaluate, negotiate, and manage ticketing platform relationships (e.g., Bandwango, Ticketmaster, or comparable providers), with a strong bias toward Noisy Creek retaining ownership of customer and transaction data.
- Write clear, well-reasoned product specs, business cases, and roadmap documents that align technical and non-technical stakeholders — from engineering partners to the executive team — around priorities and trade-offs.
- Own vendor and technical partner relationships end-to-end: contract negotiation, performance management, and build-vs-buy decisions balanced against budget, timeline, and long-term platform strategy.
- Partner cross-functionally with editorial, advertising, membership, and events leaders across The Stranger , Portland Mercury , Chicago Reader , EverOut, and Bold Type Tickets to surface and prioritize product opportunities.
- Establish metrics frameworks and reporting that connect technical product decisions to business outcomes — reader growth, retention, membership redemption, ad yield — and use that data to drive prioritization.
- Build the mechanisms (documentation, roadmap reviews, intake processes) that let a small, fast-moving team make good technical product decisions without constant re-litigation.
- Provide immediate technical product support and direction to Noisy Creek's existing engineering team, including prioritization, specs, and roadmap planning, from day one.
- Build the business case for growing a technical product function over time — identifying where additional product, program, or analyst roles are needed to support Noisy Creek's scope — and hire, mentor, and manage that team as it's approved.
- Other duties may be assigned based on company needs
