Lead Product Manager

Instrumental Inc.; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 210,000 - 298,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Vision insurance

Dental coverage

Commuter plans

Parental leave

Job summary

Instrumental is seeking a Lead Product Manager in the Bay Area to own product strategy and outcomes for our Manufacturing Acceleration Platform. You will collaborate with engineers solving complex problems and translate domain expertise into software, hardware, and services that improve yield and throughput.

Travel up to 25% is possible as you define priorities, roadmaps and measurable value for customers and internal teams.

Qualifications

• 8+ years hands-on product management or founder experience in early- or mid-stage startup with significant ownership of a product offering.
• Demonstrated ability to devote 20%+ time weekly to direct customer engagement and incorporate customer feedback into product practice.
• Proven trust-building with technical customers; manufacturing or industrial AI experience not strictly required.
• Strong data mindset; proficient with data analysis, statistics basics, and querying databases.
• Strong product taste and storytelling; ability to prioritize and build conviction for product direction.
• Experience operating at the AI tooling frontier and enabling data-driven collaboration across cross-functional teams.

Responsibilities

• Know the customer: investigate workflows, equipment, data, and constraints with customer engineers; inform prioritization and storytelling; travel up to 25%.
• Deliver on business objectives: set clear targets for product performance, market fit, and value; drive towards them.
• Work in public: share priorities, trade-offs, success criteria, roadmaps, and decisions across the org.
• Prototype and simplify: prototype with AI and run field trials; test assumptions and iterate quickly.
• Define quality and trust: build evals with domain experts; ensure outputs are verifiable and recoverable with human approval where needed.
• Enable independent creation: build reusable guidance with clear ownership; turn field learnings into repeatable capabilities.
• Follow through: track outcomes, remove deployment barriers, and learn from failures to improve.

Skills

Startup experience

Customer focus

Data fluency

AI tools literacy

Industry knowledge

Tools

Spreadsheets

SQL

Databases

Job description

Instrumental builds technology that enables electronics manufacturing to improve itself. Our Manufacturing Acceleration Platform combines factory signals, performance data, and deep context to improve yield and throughput. NVIDIA, Meta, and L3Harris rely on Instrumental to accelerate product development and scale manufacturing. Our customers represent 80% of the AI infrastructure market, building the PCBAs, trays, and racks used in AI datacenters.

Our customers are engineers solving difficult problems in how physical products are built. Earning their trust takes close relationships, technical depth, and products whose recommendations withstand scrutiny. As a Lead Product Manager at Instrumental, you will work directly with these engineers to understand their workflow, turn their expertise into product capabilities, and measure the value those capabilities deliver. Instrumental’s product spans AI software, vision hardware, and forward-deployed services – and your solutions will integrate all three to deliver outcomes to customer manufacturing lines.

You’ll practice radical collaboration across both our customers and internal experts to identify and size opportunities, define priorities, and own outcomes. With AI, discovery, design, and building happen in the same week, often by the same people. What is precious is judgment. You’ll leverage your taste and judgment to ensure we focus on the right things. We measure ourselves on one thing: building the right product, fast and well.

What You’ll Do

• Know the customer: Investigate workflows, equipment, data, and constraints with customer engineers; incorporate your learnings into your prioritization and storytelling. Travel up to 25%.
• Deliver on business objectives: Set clear targets for product performance, market fit and value, and consistently drive towards them.
• Work in public: Make priorities, trade-offs, success criteria, roadmaps, and decisions visible across the organization.
• Prototype and simplify: Prototype with AI and run field trials. Test assumptions, reduce complexity, and deliver useful improvements quickly.
• Define quality and trust: Build evals and context with domain experts, check automated judgments against theirs, and validate under real operating conditions. Design how users verify, correct, and recover from outputs, including when human approval is required.
• Enable independent creation: Build reusable guidance and product-work harnesses with clear decision boundaries and maintenance ownership. Turn field learning into repeatable capabilities.
• Follow through: Track outcomes, resolve deployment barriers with the relevant teams, and turn failures into tested improvements. Close the loop with contributors.

Requirements

• Real zero-to-one experience: 8+ years of hands‑on product management or founder experience at an early‑or mid‑stage startup with significant ownership of a product offering. You have real startup DNA and thrive in high‑risk, uncertain environments.
• Radical attention on the customer. Every PM knows they should spend time with customers, but we only want to talk to those who carve out 20%+ time week after week to make customers a core part of their product practice.
• Trusted by technical customers: demonstrated ability to earn the trust of technical customer stakeholders. Manufacturing or industrial AI experience is not required because you’ve shown you can quickly learn unfamiliar domains.
• Relentless about data. Demonstrated ability to understand complex customer datasets. The core of Instrumental is manufacturing data from some of the world’s most complex devices – you are a whiz with spreadsheet spelunking, basic statistics, and database queries.
• Proven product taste. In the AI Era, taste and human‑centric storytelling is in short supply. You love AI tools but reject AI slop in favor of thoughtful, sound judgment to drive product prioritization and build conviction.
• Leading edge AI fluency. You’re constantly evolving your product practice to incorporate new tooling and the new ways of working they enable. You operate at the frontier of AI‑driven collaboration and productivity, and help everyone on your team make better decisions, understand customers, and do useful work.

We’re a growing team that works collaboratively, is supportive of each other, and is highly energized by the opportunity for a large impact. We actively work to promote an inclusive environment, valuing passion and the ability to learn. You’re encouraged to apply even if your experience doesn’t precisely match the job description!

The following is a representative annual base salary range for this position within the Bay Area: $210,000-$298,000. We consider candidates at multiple levels for this role. Job level and salary opportunities are evaluated through our interview process – we review the experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities of each applicant.

• Instrumental is proud to offer a highly-rated variety of benefits, including health, vision, dental, commuter plans, and parental leave.

At Instrumental, protecting company and customer information is a shared responsibility. Employees are expected to comply with company engineering, security, access control, and privacy policies, and promptly report suspected security incidents or policy violations.