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Product Lead — Next-Gen Product
Instrumental Inc
Palo AltoHybrid2mo ago
- Employment
- Full-time
- Seniority
- Lead
About the role
- A problem decomposer — you take a big, ambiguous problem from the exec team or a customer and break it into smaller pieces that a small team can ship in days, not months. This is your core skill.
- Customer-embedded — comfortable on the factory floor, in the customer's ops center, or wherever the real workflow lives. You don't just visit customers; you live in their world enough to know when a solution actually changes their workflow versus when they're being polite.
- A strong partner to technical co-owners — you co-design solutions with your tech lead, not hand off specs. You have opinions about what to build and can hold your own in technical conversations, even if you're not writing the code.
- Wired for fast iteration — you ship small, validate quickly, and course-correct. You'd rather ship something imperfect this week than something polished next month.
- Strong at turning vision into plan into execution — you take a strategic direction, figure out what needs to happen, and drive it through to shipped product.
- AI-forward — using AI tools daily for research, analysis, prototyping, and coordination. This is an evaluation criterion, not a nice-to-have.
- You've never worked at a startup before
- You expect a 9-5 (we have a global customer base and operations)
- You want a remote job
- Ambiguity and urgency stress you
- You want to do pure research/discovery without shipping — this role ships iterations weekly
- Turn product vision and strategy into a concrete plan, then decompose that plan into smaller, shippable pieces that your pod can tackle iteratively.
- Own your pod's outcomes while collaborating with your tech lead — together you design solutions, make tradeoff decisions, sequence work, and ship.
- Be forward-deployed with your design partner customer — spend real time in their environment, build custom solutions that solve their specific problems, then work to scale what works into repeatable product. Be in the factory, on the calls, in the data.
- Ship small iterations that deliver value consistently — this is how we validate product direction. Speed of validated learning is the metric.
- Make daily judgment calls on scope and priority without escalating — if the CPO becomes a bottleneck for your pod, the system is broken.
- Use AI for coordination, documentation, and task management — freeing your time for the work that actually matters: problem decomposition, customer truth, and judgment.
- 5+ years of experience in a role that required breaking down complex, ambiguous problems and delivering solutions with a small team — product management, forward-deployed engineering, solutions engineering, technical program management, or founding a company.
- Deep comfort in manufacturing or adjacent industrial environments — you speak the language of quality engineers, line operators, and manufacturing managers. Or you've worked in a similarly complex operational domain and can learn manufacturing fast.
- Demonstrated ability to work in a tight partnership with engineering — co-designing solutions, not just writing requirements.
- Track record of shipping fast in ambiguous environments with minimal process overhead.
- Strong customer-facing skills — you've spent real time with customers in their environment, not just in conference rooms.
- AI-forward in how you work — using AI tools aggressively for your own productivity.
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