- Own the platform roadmap. Hold the multi-year, solution-agnostic view, then break it into work that ships this sprint. Decide where to invest beyond today's customer requests, and what to build, integrate, or source through partners. Track where industrial software and our competitors are heading, and decide where FlowFuse can establish meaningful differentiation.
- Run the field-to-platform loop. Partner with Solutions Engineering to spot product gaps and recurring patterns in customer deployments. Decide what becomes a platform capability, what stays in the solution library, and what remains customer-specific. The goal: field-developed work becomes repeatable enterprise solutions, not unicorns we rebuild for every customer.
- Learn our customers and the IIoT domain fast, then keep learning. Run continuous discovery. Sit in on sales and customer calls, mine the recordings in Fathom for the problem behind the request, and talk to users directly.
- Make industrial data a first-class part of the platform. Lead the direction for industrial data modeling and contextualization: data models defined once and enforced across instances and sites, and the relationships between machines, processes, production events, decisions, and outcomes that our workflows and AI build on. AI readiness starts here.
- Shape AI/ML in the platform. Lead the product direction for reusable AI/ML capabilities (AI-assisted development, agentic workflows, industrial data reasoning, machine vision integration), with clear judgment about what's production-ready versus a promising demo.
- Make the platform enterprise-ready. Make it easier for customers and solution engineers to build, deploy, govern, and operate distributed Node-RED applications across many sites, mixed equipment, and cloud or self-hosted environments.
- Run the lane day to day. Triage the backlog and every new idea that flies in, prioritize ruthlessly, sequence it, and get it into sprints.
- Write GitHub issues your engineers respect. Precise, technical, unambiguous, with testable acceptance criteria. They should never have to guess what "done" means.
- Run refinement with engineering. Show up prepared, make the calls, unblock fast, and validate outcomes after release.
- Know the split. Product owns the roadmap, the what, and the why, and writes the issues. Engineering owns the how, technical design, and delivery estimates. Scope and sequencing tradeoffs are made together. There's no classic PM / designer / engineer trio here. It's mostly you and the engineers.
- Wear other hats. This is a small startup. Some weeks the highest-leverage thing you can do isn't in your job description. You do it anyway.
The harder part of the job
Leadership here moves fast and thinks out loud. Ideas arrive at high volume and high velocity, from the CEO, our investors, your peers, and the live customer deals sales is racing to close. Part of the job is to be the filter and the translation layer. Absorb that energy, turn it into a clear and sequenced plan, and protect the engineering team's focus so they can do their best work. You don't pass chaos through. You stop it at your desk.
You'll partner closely with Solutions Engineering, who own customer solutions, industry-specific applications, and solution packaging. They are your most important internal customer. A big part of being effective is turning their field requests into platform capabilities that serve many solutions, not one, without the team feeling whiplash.
You'll also work with our CTO on technical direction and the Node-RED ecosystem. The CTO leads the Node-RED open-source project. You can advocate for upstream changes, but you don't own that project.
You report to the VP of Engineering and Product. You work with the engineering team, not against it. Earning their trust is the job, not a nice-to-have.
Where this goes
You start as a product team of one, owning the platform and doing the groundwork yourself. You may stay a team of one for a while, and we'd rather say that up front. From day one, you bring a point of view on where the platform should go. We're hiring someone to shape the plan, not just execute the one they inherit. Prove you can run it, and the path opens: take on more of the product surface, build and lead a product team, and help shape the wider product vision for FlowFuse.
This scope is additive, not a graduation. A bigger title doesn't mean your baseline changes, at least not until you've built a team. We're putting that in writing because we mean it.