Product Manager, Commercial OPE

Location:

Charlotte, North Carolina | On-site, Full Time |

We're entering the commercial outdoor power equipment market as an organization. We don't have established dealer relationships yet, and we're building our overseas engineering capability as part of this expansion. This is genuinely new territory for us.

Which means you get to build something from the ground up. You'll define how we think about commercial customers, how we work with dealers, how we collaborate with our engineering team in China, and what kind of company we become in this space. You're not executing a predetermined playbook—you're helping write it. You'll own outcomes in a way that rarely happens in mature product lines.

You're the bridge between two worlds: a dealer's service garage and a China engineering lab. You need to be equally comfortable troubleshooting a spec issue with a maintenance technician and debating motor efficiency tradeoffs with your overseas engineering team. This role requires someone who can walk into a dealer environment without flinching, understand the technical and commercial pressures they face, and translate those needs into precise engineering specifications that your China counterparts can build right the first time.

• Spend significant time in the field with dealers, service technicians, and fleet operators. You're learning how they buy, what they actually need vs. what they say they need, and what will make us either a partner or a headache for them.
• Build the foundation for lasting relationships. Early dealer conversations shape everything downstream—your role is to listen, learn, and establish trust that carries through product launches.
• Translate dealer feedback and field friction into engineering requirements. You're the person who catches problems before manufacturing, not after.
• Champion serviceability and total cost of ownership as competitive advantages in a channel where long‑term relationships matter more than price alone.

• Lead product specification reviews with China engineering. You need to understand technical tradeoffs deeply enough to defend spec decisions, not just relay them.
• Manage the process of getting specs right before manufacturing starts. This is where most of the value happens—catching ambiguity and misalignment early.
• Develop documentation and processes that will scale. You're not just shipping one product; you're establishing how this team works together.
• Build a roadmap based on dealer input and competitive reality, not wishful thinking. Your job is to be realistic about what the market will support.
• Own category P&L. Monitor margin, drive pricing strategy, identify cost reduction opportunities that don't compromise the dealer relationship.
• Conduct your own voice‑of‑customer research. You're not waiting for a research firm; you're in the field gathering intelligence and understanding what's actually driving decisions.
• Define competitive positioning based on dealer feedback and your own assessment. What's actually different about us in this space?

• Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering, Manufacturing Engineering, Business Administration, or equivalent.
• 7–10 years in commercial outdoor power equipment, commercial landscaping equipment, or directly adjacent categories (small engines, industrial compressors, etc.). Deep category knowledge matters here.
• Career progression from design or manufacturing engineering into product management. You understand engineering and have learned to think commercially.
• Has shipped at least two complete products end‑to‑end: from specification through engineering review, manufacturing validation, and launch.
• Experience working with overseas engineering teams (Asia‑based preferred). This could be managing, reviewing specs, attending design reviews—actual involvement, not just delegation.
• Comfort moving between dealer/service environments and technical engineering conversations. You don't need to be a master mechanic, but you can't flinch from either world.

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