Chief Product Officer

Fiducial; Delft; Hybrid; EUR 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity stake

Flexible hours

Hybrid Delft office

Travel expenses reimbursed

Company laptop

25 vacation days

Job summary

Fiducial in Delft, the Netherlands, seeks a Chief Product Officer to own the connection between market needs and our on-board UAV software roadmap. You will lead product direction with the founders, talk to users, shape requirements, and decide what we build next.

You will build and lead the product function as we scale, prioritise portfolio initiatives, and define pricing and go-to-market strategies for multiple capabilities.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in product with a senior track record owning strategy, roadmap and portfolio.
• Experience in startup-to-scale-up journeys and strong business judgment.
• Ability to connect customer/market reality to engineering and product teams.
• Ownership of pricing, packaging and business models for a portfolio.
• Experience shaping and executing go-to-market with commercial teams.
• User-obsessed mindset focusing on adoption, usability, and documentation.
• Ability to map market trends into concrete product opportunities.
• Comfort operating hands-on in a small, fast-moving team.
• Full-time availability.

Responsibilities

• Own product vision and strategy aligned with mission and evolving tech.
• Own the product roadmap and balance customer needs with platform initiatives.
• Translate operator needs into clear direction for engineering and back to market value.
• Manage a modular portfolio of capabilities as a cohesive ecosystem.
• Own usability, onboarding, documentation, and adoption paths.
• Define pricing, packaging, and business models across the portfolio.
• Shape go-to-market in partnership with commercial teams.
• Map market trends and competitors to inform bets.
• Lead and build the product function as the company scales.

Skills

Product strategy

Roadmap ownership

Market understanding

Pricing & business models

Go-to-market

User adoption & usability

Stakeholder communication

Leadership (hands-on)

Job description

Chief Product Officer (CPO)

Preferred starting date: ASAP

Weekly availability: Full-time (40 hours/week)

Location: Delft, the Netherlands (hybrid
Report to: CEO

About the company

Fiducial is a young but fast-growing deep-tech start-up with big ambitions at the frontier of autonomy, perception, and defence. Currently, we are developing software for advanced on-board UAV situational awareness in military applications. Using low-cost and widely available sensors and compute, our solutions are built for scalability. From there, we plan to develop a line-up of interconnected solutions to safeguard European safety.

Our team consists of engineers that are passionate about the technology and solutions they develop. The only time most of us are not thinking about the technology is when we are asleep, and sometimes even then. Our team members have a background in different fields such as Aerospace Engineering, Computational Science and Engineering, Robotics and Computer Graphics. Our office is located in the Aerospace Innovation Hub, a start-up hub located on the TU Delft campus in the faculty of Aerospace Engineering.

We work closely with top-tier partners, ranging from government agencies and prime contractors to academic research institutes and other start-ups. Our projects span from large tender orders in collaboration with partners to low TRL research with government agencies. Whether through formal R&D programs or rapid prototyping tracks, we operate at the intersection of innovation and deployment.

Your role

As Chief Product Officer, you own the connection between what the market and our operators need and what we build. You are the bridge between customers, commercial, and engineering, turning field feedback and market insight into a clear product strategy, a coherent portfolio, and a roadmap the whole company can rally behind. You define how our capabilities become products: how they are packaged, priced, taken to market, and adopted by the people who use them in the field.

This is a hands-on leadership role in a young company. You set product direction alongside the founders, and you also do the work: talking to users, shaping requirements, and making the calls that decide what we build next and why. As we grow, you build and lead the product function.

Key Responsibilities

• Product vision & strategy. Owning and articulating a company-wide product strategy tied to our mission and keeping it alive as the market and the technology evolve.
• Product roadmap ownership. Owning the product roadmap and prioritization across the portfolio, balancing customer-driven delivery against longer-term platform and R&D initiatives.
• Market-to-technical bridge. Translating operator needs, market signals, and partner requirements into clear direction for engineering, and translating technical capability back into value the market understands.
• Portfolio management. Managing the breadth of the product portfolio: how our capabilities in detection, navigation, interception, and beyond fit together as a modular, scalable ecosystem rather than isolated tools.
• User experience & adoption. Owning how usable our products are for end users: ease of use, onboarding, training, documentation, and the adoption path from first deployment to routine operational use.
• Pricing & business model. Defining pricing, packaging, and business models across the portfolio, and owning the product side of the classic marketing mix (the 4Ps).
• Go-to-market. Partnering with commercial and business development to shape and execute go-to-market for each capability, from positioning and narrative to capability briefs and demos.
• Market intelligence. Mapping the market continuously: trends, competitors, adjacent opportunities, and where the next product bets should be.
• Regulatory & compliance interface. Given the defence context, factoring export control, procurement, and relevant standards into product decisions, working with the right internal and external stakeholders.
• Building the function. As we scale, hiring, mentoring, and leading a product team, and putting lightweight product processes in place that fit a fast-moving deep-tech company.

What you will deliver in your first year

• A clear, documented product strategy and roadmap, aligned with the founders and understood across the company.
• A defined product portfolio structure across our capability lines, with clear ownership and priorities.
• A working feedback loop that turns field and operational insight into product decisions.
• Pricing and business-model proposals for the core product lines.
• A joint go-to-market plan with commercial for at least one capability, taken through to execution.
• Measurable improvement in product adoption and usability through better onboarding, documentation, and training for operators and partners.
• A market map and opportunity assessment that informs the next set of product bets.

What we expect from you

• 8+ years in product, with a senior track record owning product strategy, roadmap, and portfolio in a technical product environment.
• Experience across the startup-to-scale-up journey, and ideally the step beyond, with the judgment to know what a company needs at each stage.
• A strong bridgebuilder: you connect customers and market reality to engineering, and you are comfortable in deeply technical conversations without being the engineer yourself.
• Demonstrated ownership of pricing, packaging, and business models (the product side of the 4Ps).
• Experience shaping and executing go-to-market together with commercial teams.
• A user-obsessed mindset: you care about adoption, usability, training, and documentation, not only features.
• The ability to map a market, read trends, and turn them into concrete product opportunities.
• Comfort operating hands-on in a small, fast-moving team while also setting long-term direction.
• Strong communication and stakeholder skills, from the field and the shop floor to founders, partners, and government stakeholders.
• Full-time availability.

Nice to have

• Domain experience in defence, drones/UAV, aerospace, or other dual-use or high-stakes technology. A real plus, but not a must.
• Experience navigating regulated environments and their impact on product, such as export control, procurement, certification, or standards.
• Experience building and leading a product team from an early stage.

We know this exact combination is rare. If you have a strong track record of building products that reached real users and shaped a company’s direction, and the judgment to navigate the rest, we want to talk.

What we offer

• A seat at the leadership table, shaping the direction of the company alongside the founders.
• A meaningful equity stake. We want the people building the company to own part of it.
• Competitive compensation.
• 25 vacation days per year.
• Reimbursed travel expenses and company laptop.
• (Really) flexible working hours, with a hybrid setup around our Delft office.
• Working in an international, world-class team of engineers and entrepreneurs solving real-life problems with technology that matters.
• The rare opportunity to define the product function of a deep-tech defence company from an early stage, and to see what you build deployed in environments where it genuinely counts.