Senior Vice President Product Management — Los Angeles Metropolitan Area

Our client is a private equity-backed leader in inventory and warehouse management software. They are transitioning from an on-prem product to a cloud platform and are looking for a hands-on product leader who will own product across the portfolio. This is a truly hands-on role where you will spend real time with customers in warehouses and on factory floors, and work closely with engineers as things get built.

WHAT YOU'LL OWN:

• Product strategy and the roadmap across the cloud platform, legacy on-premise product, and a CRM product they recently acquired

• Segmentation, sizing, and packaging

• The product team - you will be growing the team

• The quality bar

• The customer relationship on product. Beta programs, reference customers, and the feedback loop that decides what we build next.

WHAT YOU'LL BE DOING:

• Go to the customer, not the customer summary. On factory floors, in warehouses, at planning desks. Their best product insights have come from people who went and looked.

• Build the first version yourself. Prototype with AI, put it in front of customers, and hand engineering something already tested against a real workflow.

• Decide what is not worth doing. The team has more surface area than they can serve well. The most valuable thing a product leader can do here is narrow the target and finish something.

• Set the pace. They ship weekly. Treat delays as a cost to learning, and be explicit about tradeoffs rather than slow about them.

• Grow product judgment in others. Build a team of people who think in problems rather than features, hold their own with engineers, and make good calls without you in the room.

WHO YOU ARE:

• You love products - You are drawn to the product itself, not to running a product organization. You still open the app. You still file bugs.

• Domain fluency in the warehouse management space - You understand Bill of materials, sales orders, manufacturing orders, purchase orders, receiving, picking, lot and serial tracking, demand forecasting. You understand how goods and raw materials physically move and how products get built.

• SMB instincts - You have built for small businesses, where the buyer is the operator, the budget is real money to a real person, and customers do not have an implementation team.

• Segmentation and sizing - You can size a market, pick a segment, and defend both with evidence. You have said no to a segment before and been right.

• Builder mentality - You work alongside engineers and designers rather than writing specs for them. Comfortable in architecture discussions and prototyping sessions.

• Radical urgency - Days, not weeks. Continuous shipping. Clear about tradeoffs rather than slow about them.

• Detail obsessed - You notice the required field with no indicator, the error message nobody wrote, the workflow that cannot be finished. These are the things that lose customers.

• Fluent with AI as a tool - You use modern AI tooling in your own work daily, you have shipped AI capability into a product, and you can tell the difference between where it creates value and where it is decoration.

• Customer-centric - You solve problems you have watched someone have. You recognize patterns across customers. You say no thoughtfully.

• Strategic articulation - You can explain product direction to a customer, a board, and an engineer, and have all three understand it.

• Team builder - You recruit well, you develop product judgment in others rather than making every call yourself, and people follow you to the next company.

• Quality ownership - You believe quality belongs to the team that builds it, and you build the system that makes that true.

WHAT YOU NEED:

• 10+ years in product management, with 5+ in senior leadership owning multiple product areas.

• Direct domain experience in inventory, manufacturing, supply chain, distribution, or adjacent operational software.

• Experience in SMB software, where the user is the owner or the operator.

• A track record of shipping, with examples of products you personally shaped from first prototype to general availability.

• Demonstrated experience building and shipping AI-powered capability into a product, not just managing a roadmap that mentions AI.

• Proven ability to recruit and retain strong product managers.

Preferred

• Product-led growth experience: self-serve trial, in-product onboarding, usage-based packaging.

• Familiarity with the systems our customers also run: accounting platforms, e-commerce channels, shipping, payments, ERP, and WMS.

• Experience in a private equity-backed company, including what it means to operate against a plan.

• Experience with a product transition from on-premise to cloud, from either side of it.