Technical Product Manager

Description

The company is developing a humanoid robot that must do useful work reliably at a viable cost. This product manager role helps lead its research, development, and the path from validation to mass production and deployment.

You will turn customer needs into clear product requirements and carry decisions through development, validation, production, and deployment. You will work with customers and engineers to find valuable applications, rebuild real workflows, and measure performance in realistic conditions. Your findings will set priorities, product trade-offs, and what the company can credibly promise customers.

You will report to the Head of Product and work with engineering leads to plan the roadmap and link hardware work with software and learned capabilities. The role needs sound technical judgement, quantitative research, and follow-through in practice.

The company follows a fast-follower strategy, timing capital to the point where deployment has proven itself.

Responsibilities

• Research customers and markets: run customer discovery, measure task times, operating conditions, and costs, assess market size and customer payback, recommend applications, and agree measurable targets and development stages with customers and engineering.
• Analyse competitors: compare rival robots and alternative automation through research, teardowns, and repeatable benchmarks. Separate published claims from measured results, quantify performance and cost gaps, and turn them into product priorities.
• Own the roadmap and requirements: build a prioritised roadmap and measurable targets for payload, reach, runtime, durability, and serviceability. Challenge requirements that add no value and resolve conflicts between customer value and technical feasibility with engineering.
• Set cost and performance trade-offs: agree subsystem and unit cost targets with engineering, finance, and supply chain. Show how performance, reliability, and service choices affect production cost, margins, and customer economics at planned volumes, then drive improvements with engineering.
• Replicate customer use cases: rebuild customer workflows with engineering and operations, using representative objects, layouts, equipment, and conditions. Design repeatable trials, investigate failures, and use the evidence to refine requirements before customer deployment.
• Define robot capabilities: set task and skill priorities with AI, software, and engineering leads. Set targets for task success rate, cycle time, human assistance, downtime, and recovery. Shape the robot's appearance, operation, and service so people feel confident using it.
• Manage documentation and process: keep product requirements, acceptance criteria, and decision records current. With systems engineering, link each requirement to test evidence and review proposed changes. Improve documentation and review practices so teams can decide quickly with good information.
• Lead lifecycle and new product introduction (NPI): guide development from prototype through production and later improvements in use. With leadership, engineering, safety, quality, and project management, agree measurable exit criteria for engineering, design, and production validation, review evidence at each gate, and track open gaps until they are closed.

Requirements

• You have taken complex mechatronic hardware through validation into production or customer deployment, and contributed clearly to product or engineering decisions. You can show measurable results in production volume, reliability, cost, or customer value.
• You understand how mechanics, electronics, controls, and software interact. You can question a power budget, read a test result, and discuss engineering trade-offs. An engineering degree or equivalent practical experience is your foundation.
• You have turned customer problems into testable requirements, chosen between competing priorities, and taken decisions through development. You can explain when you changed direction, which evidence drove the change, and how the product improved.
• You build credible benchmarks and business cases from experiments, technical data, and customer research. You decide in time when evidence is incomplete, test the assumptions that matter most, and adjust quickly as results arrive.
• You write requirements engineers can act on and explain technical choices in business terms. You speak confidently with operators, customers, and colleagues, set realistic expectations, and lead teams to decisions. Fluent English is essential.
• You have defined build-gate exit criteria, reviewed test evidence, and maintained product documentation through hardware launches in an NPI or VDA style process. This includes experience with APQP or VDA from automotive, or NPI from consumer electronics or robotics, and with requirements traceability and engineering change control.