Role Overview
The Lead Product Manager owns one area of the FlowFuse product outright and runs it end to end: vision, roadmap, backlog, prioritization, sprint sequencing, refinement, and the GitHub issues engineers build from.
The area of ownership is assigned based on company priorities and can shift over time. It may be Certified Nodes and the protocols that connect customers to their industrial systems (OPC UA, S7, MQTT), the core platform, the infrastructure underneath it, or how FlowFuse applies AI for its users. The shape of the role stays constant regardless of the area: a single owner who lives in their domain and runs it like it's theirs.
Core Responsibilities
- Continuous Discovery: Sitting in on sales and customer calls, reviewing call recordings, and talking to users directly to find the problem behind each request. The Lead PM develops deep knowledge of FlowFuse customers and the industrial IoT domain, and keeps that knowledge current.
- Owning the Area Roadmap: Holding the one-to-three-year view for their area and breaking it into work that ships in the current sprint.
- Running the Area Day to Day: Triaging the backlog and incoming ideas, prioritizing, sequencing, and moving work into sprints.
- Writing Exacting Specifications: Producing precise, technical, unambiguous GitHub issues. The Lead PM writes the spec and the ticket, and what they write is what gets built.
- Running Refinement with Their Engineering Squad: Arriving prepared, making product calls within their area, and unblocking the team quickly.
- Filtering and Translating Input: Absorbing high-volume input from leadership, peers, and active customer deals to create a clear and sequenced plan while protecting the engineering team's focus.
Scope Clarifications
- People management: The Lead PM leads product decisions and runs refinement for their squad, but does not manage the engineers implementing the work.
- Technical decisions on how the product is built or architected are outside the scope.
- Effort estimations are provided by the PM, but the DRI for this process is the CTO.
Skills
- Bias Toward Action: Moves fast, ships, and shows their work. Prefers making a reversible call today over scheduling a meeting about it next week.
- Proven Craft: Has written real specifications and tickets, owned a backlog, and run refinement with an engineering squad.
- Fast Learner of Hard Domains: A demonstrated track record of going deep on a difficult domain matters more than existing IIoT credentials.
- Fluency with Engineers: Speaks their language, respects their constraints, and makes their work easier.
- Sound Judgment Under Pressure: Holds a firm line on guardrails, coaches others toward their best work, and makes hard calls when needed.
- Fluency with AI Tools: Already uses AI tools to draft specifications, prototype, and work faster.
- Comfort with Ambiguity: Thrives in a small, fast-moving startup where priorities shift.