Founding Product Manager (m/f/d)

A11; Berlin; On-site; EUR 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

First product seat with real influence

Close collaboration with founders

Live product with real customers

AI-native stack

MacBook and sport membership

Path to Head of Product

On-site team in Hamburg

Job summary

A11 is seeking a Founding Product Manager to join as the first product leader and shape the product with the founders. You will talk to customers weekly, run sessions, and decide what to build and why. You will own the roadmap, write specs, and ship alongside engineers in a fast-growing Europe-wide procurement platform.

You’ll learn quickly, ship real features, and influence a product aiming to surface tenders across 29 countries with AI-driven workflows.

Qualifications

• 1+ year of hands-on product experience, ideally in B2B SaaS.
• You've shipped something real and can show impact.
• You run customer interviews and translate insights into decisions.
• You test assumptions with qualitative and quantitative data.
• You write specs engineers can build from and discuss trade-offs.
• Fluent German and English.

Responsibilities

• Talk to customers weekly and run product sessions with bid teams.
• Turn insights into bets, design experiments, and measure outcomes.
• Own and defend the roadmap with evidence.
• Collaborate with engineering to shape solutions and ship.
• Analyze post-release usage and iterate based on feedback.
• Build a system to capture customer signals from interviews to support requests.
• Share findings with founders to guide next steps.

Skills

Product experience

Customer interviews

Data-driven decisions

Tech understanding

German-English fluency

Tools

AI products experience

Product analytics

AI-native workflows

Job description

As a key growth accelerator, A11 partners with Europe’s most ambitious startups and scaleups, corporates and SMBs to connect them with top-tier talent ready to make an impact.

We're looking for a motivated Founding Product Manager (m/f/d) to join and build the product function at one of our Ecosystem companies.

As a Founding Product Manager, you'll be the first product manager and work side by side with the founders to help decide what we build, for whom, and why; your decisions shape the product from your first week. Public procurement still runs on fragmented portals and PDFs nobody reads in time. We're live with customers, we talk to them constantly, and every conversation shows us where the product needs to go. You'll make sure we learn faster than anyone else in this market and turn that into the product our customers use to win public contracts, learning the product by owning real decisions, seeing what they do in real usage, and working next to the founders who have shaped this product from day one.

Join the A11 Ecosystem - a next-generation procurement platform redefining how businesses discover, evaluate, and win public tenders across one of the world's largest yet most fragmented markets: €2 trillion in annual contract volume, scattered across 4,500+ portals in 29 countries. It harnesses qualified AI matching and agentic workflow automation to surface only the tenders that fit, analyze 100+ page documents in 30 seconds, and draft winning bids in minutes. Backed by leading investors, the company is scaling fast toward becoming the category-defining player in European public procurement.

In this role, you’ll:

• Talk to customers every week and run your own product sessions, digging into how bid teams actually work, from the first tender alert to the final submission
• Turn insights into bets: form hypotheses, design experiments, define what success looks like, and let the data decide
• Own the roadmap and defend it with evidence
• Work side by side with engineering: shape the solution, write the specs, and get it shipped
• After release, watch what customers actually do, talk to them again, and decide what to double down on
• Build the system that captures every customer signal, from interviews to sales calls to support requests
• Bring the founders your sharpest insights: which problems keep coming up, which segments respond, and where we should go next

Typical tasks (first 90 days):

• Become the team's go-to person for what our customers need
• Own the roadmap, with every item tracing back to what customers told us
• Get your first experiments live, with at least one idea killed on data before anyone wrote a line of code
• Help the team run twice as many customer conversations, with nothing learned getting lost
• Run product day-to-day so the founders can focus on scaling the company

Your Profile:

Must haves:

• 1+ year of hands-on product experience, ideally in B2B SaaS. Strong internships, side projects, or your own startup count too
• You've shipped something real, at work or on your own, and can show what changed because of it
• You run customer interviews yourself and turn what you hear into clear decisions
• You test assumptions with qualitative and quantitative data instead of guessing
• You write specs engineers can build from and understand enough tech to discuss trade-offs
• Fluent German and English

Nice-to-haves:

• Experience with AI products, including judging output quality, not just shipping features
• A background in UX research or design
• Domain experience in procurement, bid management, or other document-heavy B2B workflows
• You've set up product analytics and know which events matter
• Comfortable building AI-native workflows with tools like Claude Code, n8n, or comparable, to make research and synthesis compound

You might be a fit if you:

• Want to learn product from founders, not from a playbook
• Would rather test an idea with five customers than debate it in a meeting
• Get a kick out of seeing customers use something you pushed for
• Are comfortable saying no to a feature request when the evidence isn't there
• Are hungry for ownership and not interested in waiting for permission
• Have something outside of work that shows you don't do things halfway, whether that's competitive sports, a side project, or something completely different
• See this as the path to becoming Head of Product in a company that plans to scale fast
• Want to apply anyway and show us what you have built

Please note that this position is based in Hamburg (on-site).

Benefits and Perks:

• The first product seat, with real influence on what we build and why
• Close collaboration with the founders on every product decision, and a front-row seat to how a company gets built
• A live product with real customers, so your decisions show up in real usage and every one teaches you something
• An AI-native stack. If a tool makes you faster, we'll get it
• MacBook, sport membership, and everything you need to work at builder speed
• A clear path to Head of Product as the team scales
• An on-site team in Hamburg where people care deeply about their craft

If you’re eager to join the A11 Ecosystem and shape what’s next, we want to hear from you!

Our Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion

A11 is committed to diverse and equal opportunities hiring for all – applicants, candidates, and employees alike. We value humans – with all our glorious multifaceted backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences – and look forward to your application.