Product Lead

Volunteer role / Platform & Product

TERM: Immediate – December 31, 2027 LOCATION: Primarily Remote / Must be available for once-a-month Leadership meeting in Toronto TEAM: Platform & Product ROLE: Core Leadership Volunteer position working directly with the Strategic Director and Community Operations Director. Estimated 1–2 hours/week average (slightly higher upfront during initial onboarding and workflow setup). ABOUT The Toronto Housing Society (TOHS) is seeking an experienced, community-minded Product Lead (or collaborative product team) to take the reins on our civic software ecosystem and shape the future of our digital tools. Up until now, the entire TOHS platform—including our main hub, listing filter, live market insights dashboard, and internal moderation panel—has been personally built and operated by our Strategic Director single-handedly. While the ecosystem looks expansive from the outside, it is built leanly to serve immediate community needs without unnecessary bloat. We have reached the point where the platform needs to grow beyond what one person can manage alone. This summer we performed platform and site migrations to enable that. We are now looking for someone who will take the time to deeply understand how our tools work, help us establish structured product operations, and take our products further than a solo creator can carry them now that the infrastructure is in place. This role starts as a hands-on Product Owner across our platform, with increasing autonomy and responsibility over product direction as trust builds and our systems mature. You will work in close partnership with our Strategic Director (vision, mission alignment, and system history) and Community Operations Director (backend infrastructure & moderation panel). KEY DELIVERABLES + RESPONSIBILITIES You will drive the execution of these priorities across our digital ecosystem. Note that you are not expected to accomplish these alone—you will work alongside the TOHS Directors to recruit, scope, and onboard volunteer product developers, designers, UX researchers, and contributors to bring these initiatives to life: 1 / TOOL MANAGEMENT & ROADMAPPING Own the operational life cycle of TOHS public tools and internal moderation applications. Collaborate with Directors to translate organizational goals into a transparent 2026–2027 product roadmap. 2 / PRODUCT OPERATIONS & OPEN GOVERNANCE Establish standard product operations processes (backlog grooming, feature specification, release planning) that reflect our commitment to open governance—keeping product decisions, documentation, and workflows public wherever possible. 3 / BALANCED IDEATION & SCOPING Serve as both a creative problem solver and a pragmatic editor. Generate innovative feature concepts to address complex housing issues while actively reining in scope to protect team capacity and platform sustainability. 4 / VOLUNTEER LEADERSHIP & CONTRIBUTOR WORKFLOWS Partner with Strategy and Community Ops Directors to maintain smooth handoffs across our tech stack (GitHub, Vercel, Supabase). Guide and collaborate with a flexible, rotating mix of short-term and ongoing volunteer contributors, ensuring clear specs and supportive onboarding. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - 6+ months experience with Github. This is a hard requirement for this role. - Prior Product Experience Required: Demonstrated experience as a Product Manager or Product Owner (professional, open-source, volunteer, or client-facing). Note: Because this role establishes our PM foundations, we are unable to provide entry-level training for this position. - Open Governance Mindset: A strong passion for—or keen interest in—civic technology, open-source principles, and public, transparent workflows. - Pragmatic Scope Control: Ability to balance ambitious feature ideas with realistic technical constraints and volunteer maintenance capacity. - Tech Stack Familiarity: High comfort navigating modern web development environments, developer workflows, and product tools (e.g., GitHub issue tracking, Vercel deployments, database contexts like Supabase). Note: We are vibe-code friendly (to a degree). - Adaptable Volunteer Leadership: Comfort collaborating with and managing tasks for diverse in-and-out contributors with varying time commitments. - (Nice to Have) Lived experience in Ontario’s rental housing market or experience building tools for nonprofits, civic tech, or community-led organizations. We recognize that impact and excellence show up in diverse ways. If you meet the core PM experience requirement and care deeply about housing equity, we encourage you to apply. EXPRESSION OF INTEREST How do you approach product strategy? Please share a brief written response (1–2 paragraphs) on one of the following options: 1 / Civic Tech Analysis: Share a link to a public software tool, open-source project, or civic platform whose product design, user experience, or public roadmap you admire. Tell us 1–2 principles from that product you would bring to TOHS. 2 / Product Scoping Scenario: Tell us about a time you had to take a complex, highly requested feature and simplify or pare it down to ensure it was sustainable to build and maintain. No File Uploads: To keep our intake process clean, we do not accept attached files or PDFs. If you need to share an attachment, please provide public URLs to your portfolio/attachment via Google Docs, Notion, LinkedIn, or a shared cloud folder.

Closes / 2026-10-24