Product Manager (Mechanical Engineering Background)

Sidekick; Toronto; Hybrid; CAD 90,000 - 110,000; Full time

Job summary

Sidekick is seeking a Product Manager to own end-to-end development of new products. You will work with our Industrial Designer, engineers, physiotherapists, growth team, and manufacturing partners to craft briefs, define value, and drive from concept to first production run.

You should have a strong engineering foundation and the instinct to read customer reviews, compare with competitors, and consider price and margin. The role emphasizes pre-tooling decisions and commercial judgment.

Qualifications

• 5+ years developing physical consumer products.
• Engineering background: Mechanical is ideal, but equivalent hands-on experience counts.
• Experience taking products through tooling into production.
• Ability to explain product rationale clearly and defend decisions.
• Identify customer needs and translate them into sharp requirements.

Responsibilities

• Find and define the opportunity: conduct interviews, review data, understand category needs, build a compelling case.
• Develop, produce and launch: own the brief, manage cost and margin, oversee spec tradeoffs.
• Drive prototyping, validation, and manufacturability with design and engineering teams.
• Take the product to market: handle compliance, packaging, manuals, and first production run.

Skills

Product development

Engineering background

Tooling to production

Customer interviews

Cost & margin awareness

DFM knowledge

Education

Engineering degree (Mechanical or related)

Job description

At Sidekick, our mission is simple: help people recover faster from persistent injuries. Trusted by Olympic champions and everyday individuals, our products have been featured in Men's Health, Running Magazine, and more. With 94% of users reporting relief from chronic pain, we're on a mission to become the go-to injury relief brand.

About the Role

We're looking for a Product Manager to own new products end to end - from finding the opportunity, to defining what gets built, to signing off the first production run. You'll work daily with our Industrial Designer, engineers, physiotherapists, growth team and manufacturing partners.

Most of what decides whether a product succeeds happens before we spend a dollar on tooling. It happens in the brief: who it's for, why they'll choose it over what already exists, what they'll pay, and whether it makes money at that price. A sharp brief makes every decision after it easier. A weak one can't be rescued by good engineering.

So the foundation of this job is engineering and briefing. You need enough technical depth to hold your own with our engineers and our factories, and the discipline to define a product properly before anyone starts building it.

What Sets a Great Candidate Apart

Plenty of people can build a product that works. Far fewer can tell you, before it's built, whether anyone will buy it.

That's commercial judgment, and it's the thing that separates a good PM here from a great one. Every product we tool costs real money and takes the better part of a year. A product that works but doesn't sell is the most expensive mistake we can make.

You don't need to arrive with this fully formed. If you have the engineering foundation and the instinct - you read customer reviews for fun, you have opinions on why one competitor is winning and another isn't, you think about price and margin without being asked - we'll build the rest with you.

Key Responsibilities

1) Find and define the opportunity

• Hunt for unmet needs - customer interviews, review mining, physio conversations, category data, competitive teardowns. You bring us ideas; you don't wait for a list.
• Build the case - target customer, positioning, target price, target margin, and the assumptions that have to be true. Go deep enough on the physiology to know what a solution actually has to do, then test the risky assumptions cheaply before we commit.

2) Develop, produce and launch

• Own the brief and specs so it's unambiguous what gets built, and own cost and margin - BOM, quotes, vendor selection, and the spec tradeoffs needed to hit cost targets.
• Drive prototyping and validation - work with our Industrial Designer and engineers until the design is manufacturable, run user testing against every requirement, and make the call when a prototype falls short or testing says pivot.
• Drive DFM and tooling - approve pre-tooling samples, verify tolerances, sign off tooling and the golden sample.
• Take it to market - compliance, packaging, manuals, photography, then oversee the first production run and set the QC standards that hold quality at scale.

What We're Looking For

• 5+ years developing physical consumer products. Mechanical assemblies, tooled hardware, injection molded parts.
• An engineering background. Mechanical engineering is ideal; equivalent hands-on experience counts.
• You've taken products through tooling into production. Working knowledge of injection molding - draft, wall thickness, gate location, sink, tool actions - and how each affects unit cost and tooling cost. You know what a T1 sample is and how to tell when a factory's "yes" means "no."
• You think clearly. A brief has to make the case for why a product should exist. You can explain why a customer would choose ours over what's already out there, and your reasoning holds up when we push back on it.
• You see the product from the customer's side. You talk to customers directly and translate what they can't articulate into sharp requirements.

Compensation and Benefits

• $90,000-$110,000 CAD base, depending on experience
• Hybrid - Toronto office, with work-from-home days
• Smart people, no bureaucracy, real ownership of entire product lines
• Clear path to Head of Product as the team grows