Director​/Senior Manager of Product Development

Hirsh Industries | On-site at our Des Moines, Iowa headquarters (hybrid, minimum 3 days/week in office) | Full-time

Hirsh Industries is a leading American manufacturer of office, storage, and organizational products for personal and commercial use, sold under our SPACE SOLUTIONS®,
HIRSH®, and IRON HORSE® brands. We have been operating continuously since our founding in Iowa in 1924. What sets us apart is that we design and build our own products in our own factories — we don't outsource our manufacturing. That vertical integration gives us direct control over quality, cost, and speed to market, and a real platform for bringing new products to life quickly.

We're a company in growth mode. We're building on a strong, established base and actively expanding into new, faster-growing categories — and our product development isn't limited to any single material or process. The next wave of Hirsh products is wide open.

We're hiring a new leader for our Product Development function to own the entire journey of a new product — from the first market insight, through concept and design, into our factories, and out to launch. This is a design-led role for someone who loves shaping a product from a blank page: understanding what customers need, defining what we should build, directing the engineering team that develops the design, and then working shoulder-to-shoulder with our factories to make it real.

You'll be the person who carries a product from idea to something on a shelf, and who helps push Hirsh into exciting new markets.

This role reports to the VP of Marketing and Engineering and works cross‑functionally with engineering, operations, sourcing, and sales.

• Research market size and growth (total, serviceable, and realistically obtainable) and the risk of low‑cost imports to decide where Hirsh should play next — including new and adjacent categories.
• Lead in‑depth competitive product analysis: identify the leading sellers and manufacturers in the category, benchmark competing products on features, quality, materials, and price, run product teardowns where useful, and map where a Hirsh product can win. Turn that analysis into a sharp unique selling proposition and target customer.
• Build detailed product cost models — estimating material, component, labor, tooling, and freight cost — to set defensible target costs, stress‑test them against competitive pricing, and confirm the product can hit its margin targets before development begins.
• Assess sales‑channel and logistics fit — the right route to market, the type of sale, and how the product will ship and stock.
• Roll the cost model, pricing, and volume assumptions into a multi‑year financial case — channel and product margins, capital investment, and ROI/payback — so leadership can make a confident go/no‑go decision.
• Translate customer and end‑user insight into a clear product brief and a compelling value proposition.

• Generate and develop concepts, and partner with engineering to turn them into CAD models and prototypes — leading the selection of the ideas worth advancing.
• Own the product’s design direction: form, function, ergonomics, aesthetics, and user experience, alongside target cost and quality. The engineering team handles CAD and detailed design execution; you set the vision, requirements, and design intent, and drive iteration based on feedback and testing.
• Design with manufacturing in mind (design for manufacturability), working with engineering to make smart tradeoffs between what’s ideal and what’s producible — across current and new materials and processes.
• Confirm the concept fits Hirsh’s manufacturing capabilities and philosophy, and flag any new raw materials, components, or capacity the product would require.

• Partner with engineering and our factories to bring designs into production — tooling, process, first articles, and pilot runs.
• Resolve the design, cost, and quality tradeoffs that surface during industrialization, and confirm the…