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.
You’ll own delivery of a program with a hard Phase 1 window (Sept → Dec): turn the contractual scope into a sequenced backlog, keep the milestone gates honest, and coordinate the moving parts — the squad, the internal teams whose surfaces the product plugs into, an external data-API dependency, and the specialists who will operate the product with enterprise brands. The users are media practitioners; the product only lands if its PM understands their craft — how campaigns are planned and trafficked, how product and creative data flow through the ad platforms, what an agency team actually does with a recommendation. You are the person who keeps the build honest to that reality. This is a permanent position: the program is the first mission, not the job’s boundary.
Key responsibilities:
Own the backlog: every feature framed as a functional outcome with acceptance criteria a domain-literate reader can sign, written at the ticket, before the dev starts. That is how this team works; the PM is its first guardian.
Sequence a 3-4 month build with the squad’s tech lead, across dependencies on the surrounding Media pod (data engine, agent platform, platform features) and an external data API.
Run the milestone cadence with program stakeholders: what ships, what’s at risk, what’s descoped — early, in writing.
Own the design track: brief and coordinate the freelance designer, and keep design scoped to the MVP surfaces.
Prepare the pilot: onboarding flow for the first enterprise clients, operator playbook with the specialists, measurement plan that can tell an impact story.
Your background:
Real media-domain knowledge — the non-negotiable: you have worked in or close to paid media, ad platforms or commerce/retail media (agency, brand or ad-tech side), and you can discuss a media specialist’s workflow credibly, in their vocabulary, without an engineer or a strategist translating.
3+ years of product management on technical products (platforms, APIs, data or AI products).
Proven delivery against fixed milestones with external stakeholders — enterprise contracts, client commitments, or equivalent.
Writing as a core skill: tickets, acceptance criteria, milestone updates.
Based in Europe, CET working hours.
Nice to have: LLM products and their evaluation · partner-agency squads · both agency-side and brand-side exposure.
You’ll thrive here if you are…
You’d rather descope early in writing than slip quietly.
You think a good acceptance criterion is a product artifact, not paperwork.
You enjoy being the person who knows why every ticket exists — and what it changes for the media team that will use it.
KPIs/Success metrics:
Milestone gates met, with risks and descopes surfaced in writing before they bite.
Ticket quality: acceptance criteria signable by a domain reader without an engineer translating.
Pilot readiness: first enterprise clients onboarded with a working operator playbook and a measurement plan that can tell an impact story.
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.
https://www.trypencil.com
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.
https://www.thebrandtechgroup.com
