Backstage Library Works provides guaranteed, personal solutions to assist libraries and archives with preserving, organizing, and describing collections to enhance discovery and user access.
POSITION TITLE: Product Manager – Shelf-Ready Services
DIRECT SUPERVISOR: President
DIRECT REPORTS: Project Managers (one per office), who in turn lead teams of technicians and team leaders
SALARY SCALE: $66,664 to $88,192, commensurate with experience
LOCATION: Provo, UT (strongly preferred) or Bethlehem, PA; regular travel is expected
POSITION TYPE: Full-time exempt (salary)
Position Overview
Backstage Library Works is looking for a production-minded leader to own and elevate our Shelf-Ready Services department on behalf of the libraries and vendor partners we work with. This is a role for someone who thinks in throughput, bottlenecks, and steady improvement, and who genuinely enjoys turning a busy production floor into a well-tuned operation.
You will be responsible for the full scope of shelf-ready work: shipping and receiving logistics, physical processing workflows, and the day-to-day systems that keep items moving accurately and on time. Just as importantly, you’ll shape where the department goes next. Our processing goals are defined today, but they’re not set in stone. As we build production history, you’ll have real influence over how they evolve.
If you lead with a kaizen mindset – always improving, always iterating – you’ll fit right in for this role.
Responsibilities
- Production performance. Monitor daily and weekly productivity across both sites, identify where we can improve, and double down on what’s already working.
- Logistics & processing. Oversee shipping/receiving and the physical processing workflows that get items shelf-ready accurately and efficiently.
- Department structure. Shape how the team is organized, where work flows, and how the two sites coordinate as we scale.
- People leadership. Manage and mentor your project managers, helping them grow and helping their teams succeed.
- Stakeholder communication. Keep consistent, clear communication with library partners and our clients.
- Budget ownership. Manage expenses against budget – working within this year’s existing plan and building out future budgets as you take full ownership of the department’s financials.
- Goals & standards. Steward our processing goals – holding the line where it matters and refining them as production data tells us more.
- Innovation with an eye on scale. Pursue improvements at every level, always weighing near-term scalability.
- Sales & marketing partnership. Collaborate on initiatives, quote generation and presentation, collateral, and pricing.
Qualifications
A production mindset. You see a workflow and instinctively ask how to make it faster, cleaner, and more reliable without sacrificing quality. You are comfortable owning numbers and using them to drive decisions.
- Experience leading teams or managing, especially across multiple sites.
- A track record of process improvement or operational excellence.
- Strong, steady communication skills with both internal teams and external partners.
- Comfort balancing the day-to-day with longer-term planning.
Preferred
- Logistics or supply-chain planning experience.
- A library science background or education, or prior experience in library services.
What Success Looks Like (First 6-12 Months)
- You understand the work and have a clear picture of where the opportunities are.
- Your project managers feel well-supported and are growing in their roles.
- Workflows are measurably tighter with documented improvements we can point to.
- Partners and stakeholders consistently hear from us – proactively, not just reactively.
- You’ve helped sharpen our processing goals based on real production data.
Benefits
Benefits include health, dental, and vision insurance, 401(k) matching, and annual profit sharing.
Please submit a resume and cover letter/email to Nate Cothran, President, at nate@bslw.com with subject line “[Applicant Name] – Product Manager Application, Shelf-Ready” to apply.
Employment decisions are made without regard to race, color, religion, national or ethnic origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, disability, protected veteran status or other characteristics protected by law.
