Product Discovery Lead

Readytech; Waikato; Hybrid; NZD 150,000 - 237,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

A day off for your birthday

Additional 4 days of leave each year

ReadyTecher Awards – flights & accom.

Hybrid work with in-house baristas

Access to Sonder platform & safety/med

Parental leave top-up by company

Extra leave for miscarriage/endometri

Merch drops

Job summary

ReadyTech in Melbourne/Sydney or Hamilton, NZ is seeking a Product Discovery Lead to build our discovery practice from the ground up. This hands-on role combines research and coaching to help product teams validate problems and decide what to build next.

You’ll run qualitative and quantitative research, frame opportunities with evidence, and partner across engineering, design, and customer success to deliver impact on mission-critical workforce software.

Qualifications

• Genuine working understanding of product management, engineering and design, not just fluency in one discipline; good at prioritisation and turning ambiguity into clarity.
• An entrepreneurial background, ideally some startup product or founder experience alongside exposure to a larger, more structured organisation.
• Strong discovery and research craft, qualitative and quantitative, equally comfortable running the work yourself and teaching others to run theirs.
• Commercial and market fluency, able to translate signals into evidence-based prioritisation.
• Confidence to challenge product managers and senior stakeholders alike when priorities aren't evidence-backed, disruptive when it's needed, diplomatic about how you get there.
• Comfort building process from scratch rather than inheriting a mature one, and being fine with good while it gets there.
• Fluency with AI tools for research and synthesis, using them to move faster without letting them replace your judgement.

Responsibilities

• Own the Problem Validation gate in our discovery and delivery roadmap, deciding what's evidenced enough to move forward.
• Own the opportunity canvas practice, writing canvases yourself for platform-level initiatives and coaching PMs through theirs for squad-level ones.
• Set and maintain the quality bar for what enters the roadmap, including how it gets prioritised.
• Build a self-serve research process so PMs can confidently recruit, run and interpret their own user research, and step in hands-on when something needs deeper expertise.
• Run discovery on the problems that matter most, complex, cross-squad or platform-level work, working with product managers and engineers to ensure features are desirable, viable and feasible.
• Get in front of customers and users, not just synthesised feedback but actually spending real time with the people who use what we build.
• Coach product managers through discovery and validation day to day, building each team's own capability while serving as a source of guidance and support.
• Partner with leaders across customer success, support, sales and managed services to turn scattered feedback into one structured pipeline of insight.
• Bring commercial and market insight into problem framing through your own research, so priorities rest on evidence rather than instinct or whoever pushed hardest.
• Support post-release measurement, closing the loop on whether what shipped actually solved the validated problem.

Skills

Product management

Prioritisation

User research

Stakeholder management

AI tools for research

Job description

This role can be based in Melbourne, Sydney or Hamilton (NZ).

About us

Making a meaningful difference with mission-critical software that empowers communities to thrive.

ReadyTech is more than just a one-trick pony playing in one market with one product, or one customer. We re-imagine, design, develop and deliver technology to solve our customer’s diverse problems – supporting multiple businesses across a variety of markets to be ready for anything.

We’re an ASX-listed company which means we are stable, have a strong track record of sustainable growth and have a significant number of long-term customers. So, what does this mean for you? It means we can offer you an experience that will push you to be your best, provide career-building challenges, and that will offer you numerous growth opportunities that can’t be found in any other company.

It’s an inclusive environment where there is no place for politics, where we get our heads together to solve the problems that really matter to our customers, and where we always stay focused on our north star – the communities we serve, and society at large.

The purpose of this role

We're looking for a Product Discovery Lead to help build our product discovery practice from the ground up, at a key moment where AI has made building fast the easy part, and knowing what's worth building the actual bottleneck. This role is hands‑on discovery work and coaching in equal measure, and it draws on real product management judgement, prioritisation, trade‑offs, and turning ambiguity into clear next steps.

You’ll run research and validation on the problems that matter most to customers, while building a self‑serve process so other product managers across feature squads can confidently run their own smaller‑scale discovery too. You’ll be working on our workforce software, helping validate problems across mission‑critical systems with real compliance and regulatory obligations. Problem framing has to account for what's required, not just what's wanted.

If you’ve got an entrepreneurial streak, with some startup product or founder experience alongside time in a bigger organisation, and you genuinely understand how product management, engineering and design fit together, this is a chance to shape how a growing platform decides what to build next.

The key accountabilities of the role

• Own the Problem Validation gate in our discovery and delivery roadmap, deciding what's evidenced enough to move forward.
• Own the opportunity canvas practice, writing canvases yourself for platform‑level initiatives and coaching PMs through theirs for squad‑level ones.
• Set and maintain the quality bar for what enters the roadmap, including how it gets prioritised.
• Build a self‑serve research process so PMs can confidently recruit, run and interpret their own user research, and step in hands‑on when something needs deeper expertise.

The key responsibilities of the role

• Run discovery on the problems that matter most, complex, cross‑squad or platform‑level work, working with product managers and engineers to ensure features are desirable, viable and feasible.
• Get in front of customers and users, not just synthesised feedback but actually spending real time with the people who use what we build.
• Coach product managers through discovery and validation day to day, building each team's own capability while serving as a source of guidance and support.
• Partner with leaders across customer success, support, sales and managed services to turn scattered feedback into one structured pipeline of insight.
• Bring commercial and market insight into problem framing through your own research, so priorities rest on evidence rather than instinct or whoever pushed hardest.
• Support post‑release measurement, closing the loop on whether what shipped actually solved the validated problem.

The key requirements of the role

• Genuine working understanding of product management, engineering and design, not just fluency in one discipline; good at prioritisation and turning ambiguity into clarity.
• An entrepreneurial background, ideally some startup product or founder experience alongside exposure to a larger, more structured organisation.
• Strong discovery and research craft, qualitative and quantitative, equally comfortable running the work yourself and teaching others to run theirs.
• Commercial and market fluency, able to translate signals into evidence‑based prioritisation.
• Confidence to challenge product managers and senior stakeholders alike when priorities aren't evidence‑backed, disruptive when it's needed, diplomatic about how you get there.
• Comfort building process from scratch rather than inheriting a mature one, and being fine with good while it gets there.
• Fluency with AI tools for research and synthesis, using them to move faster without letting them replace your judgement.

Why you should become a ReadyTecher:

• A day off for your birthday- hip hip hooray!
• Additional 4 days of leave each year
• ReadyTecher Awards each quarter with the chance to win flights and accommodation to Hamilton Island
• Hybrid work, with in‑house baristas
• Access to Sonder- a technology‑driven platform supported by safety, medical and mental health experts - available 24/ 7
• Company top‑up of Government parental leave
• Additional paid leave for miscarriage, endometriosis and menopause
• And plenty of ReadyTech merch drops along the way!

ReadyTech is committed to seeing things through each other's eyes. We invest deeply in relationships by offering positivity, fairness and empathy in every interaction and love that everyone is different. We're proud to be an equal opportunity employer that celebrates our diversity of race, beliefs, sexual orientations, gender identities, age, disability status, marital status and more - so that every single one of us can feel like we belong.

As part of our commitment to ensuring a safe and secure working environment for all employees and in compliance with Australian regulations, please note that if selected for this role, you will be required to complete a comprehensive police check and an Australian working rights check. Should you have any questions or concerns regarding these requirements, please feel free to contact us.