Head of Product

pplwise GmbH; Mannheim; On-site; EUR 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

pplwise GmbH is seeking a Head of Product to own the roadmap and outcomes for our AI-driven platform that bridges engineering and purchasing in manufacturing. You will lead product strategy, collaborate with the founders, COO, engineering, sales and customer success, and help build the first product team.

You bring 5+ years of product management for B2B SaaS, deep technical and UX depth, fluency in English and German, and a track record of turning ideas into repeatable usage.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in product management for B2B SaaS.
• Proven track record turning ideas into measurable outcomes.
• Experience in early-stage or growth-phase tech companies.

Responsibilities

• Own the roadmap end-to-end with the leadership team and customers.
• Own adoption and build onboarding and iteration loops for users.
• Lead conversations with customers and translate insights into competitive advantage.
• Collaborate with engineering, design, sales and customer success to ship outcomes.
• Write clear epics, acceptance criteria and maintain a value-driven release cadence.
• Balance priorities and defend scope amid urgency.
• Drive AI capability and rapid prototyping to identify features worth building.

Skills

Product management

B2B SaaS

Roadmapping

Customer discovery

Cross-functional leadership

Job description

AI Agents to Bridge the Gap between Engineering & Purchasing to reduce manufacturing waste

My co-founder Ian and I combine over 15 years of industry experience, working with companies like SEW-Eurodrive, Terex, Bosch and Carl Zeiss. We co-founded Resourcly, a Project A-backed, industrial tech start-up to help industrial manufacturers streamline complex portfolios to improve EBIT while preventing and reducing idle inventory from being scrapped.

With our solution, we want to solve industry problems that we have tried to address for the last decade in the manufacturing companies we worked for, but that have so far been out of reach. With new technology and AI, that can finally happen.

Complex processes and products, lack of engineering talent and massive labour costs as well as a lack of intelligent automation have remained the industry's most pressing challenge. With LLMs and agents, we finally have the tools to solve this.

Our vision is that future purchasing and engineering processes will be orchestrated and run by an AI workforce - ensuring reliable and cost-efficient procurement and flow of goods in an uncertain and complicated world with finite resources.

We're already live with global manufacturing leaders in Europe

Backed by one of Europe's top early-stage funds (Project A)

Growing fast and hiring exceptional talent to join early

Our goal is to build a small, but excellent team, therefore we are looking for a Head of Product. If you are excited to work in a very early-stage environment alongside the founding team, stellar engineers and data scientists, owning the product of a company that is building an AI workforce for manufacturing - please reach out.

The Role

As our Head of Product, you own the roadmap and you own whether it lands. You lead product for a company that is live with global manufacturing leaders in Europe, and you build the team around you as we grow.

Your mandate covers the full arc: what we build, in which order, how fast it reaches customers, and how deeply it gets used. You decide what good looks like when something ships, with the discipline that every item on the roadmap carries a measurable result behind it.

You work directly with our co-founder and COO Ian, alongside engineering, sales and customer success, and you own design as part of your function. You talk to customers yourself, every week. This is a senior, high-ownership role in a small team, where product decisions get made in the room rather than in a committee.

• Own the roadmap end to end: Define and evolve it together with our leadership team and our customers, translate company goals into milestones, and make sure every item on it carries a measurable result behind it
• Own adoption end to end: Take responsibility for active usage across our customer base, and build the discovery, onboarding and iteration loops that turn a new customer into a daily user
• Run customer discovery yourself: Lead the conversations, be the voice of the customer and of the industry inside the company, and turn what you hear into a competitive advantage rather than a backlog
• Own delivery with engineering: Write and prioritise epics, user stories and clear acceptance criteria, keep planning and retrospectives value-driven, and hold the line on scope from ideation to release
• Set and defend the priorities: Make the call on sequencing with an educated argument about effort and complexity, and hold it when the pressure arrives
• Push the product's AI capability: Test hypotheses fast and scrap them faster, use AI to prototype, and know exactly when an experiment becomes a feature worth building properly
• Build for the whole market: Decide what belongs in the core product, so what we ship carries across our customer base rather than serving a single account
• A builder, not an administrator: You do not wait for a team, a process or a brief before you start, and you are comfortable creating the structure you need
• Take full ownership: From the roadmap through delivery, adoption and the number at the end of it, you own outcomes, not activities
• You hold your ground: You disagree well with engineers and with founders, and you keep a priority steady when something urgent lands on top of it
• Evidence over opinion: You work from measurable outcomes rather than from conviction alone
• Close to the customer: You want to be in the room with users, and you judge the product by what they do with it rather than by what shipped
• Technical enough to earn respect: You can go deep with engineers on a complex product, and enjoy it
• Proactive communicator: You surface progress, risks and trade-offs early, and you write decisions down with the reason behind them
• You have built early-stage products: You have taken a product from an early idea to real, repeated usage, and grown it from there
• You bring 5+ years in product management for B2B SaaS: With time spent in startups, and a track record of establishing, growing and maintaining a product
• You have owned adoption, not just launches: You can show how active usage moved and what you changed to move it
• You own delivery end to end: Backlog, epics, acceptance criteria, sprint rhythm and release, working directly with engineers rather than through a layer
• You bring real technical and UX depth: Enough to challenge an estimate, understand a complex system and make design calls, while working closely with designers rather than replacing them
• You work with AI hands-on: Practical experience with models and with AI-assistant prototyping, and the judgement to know where it belongs in a product
• You know industrial customers: B2B and manufacturing environments, and the ability to represent a company credibly in front of them
• You are fluent in English and German