Product Manager - Hand Tools & Home Improvement Industry

The Company:

Arrow Tool Group, located in Saddle Brook, NJ, is a leader in manual, electric, and cordless fastening tools for both pros and DIYers. Founded in New York City in 1929, Arrow quickly became synonymous with its flagship staple gun and its full range of T50® staples. Today, Arrow markets a full line of pneumatic, electric, and manual staplers and brad nailers, along with rivet tools, glue guns, hammer tackers, and a complete consumables assortment.

Arrow Fastener Co., LLC is a wholly owned subsidiary of Great Star Tools USA, Inc., whose other operating companies include Shop-Vac USA, Great Star Industrial US, and Prime-Line Products. Our parent company, Hangzhou Great Star Industrial Ltd., is one of the largest hand tool manufacturers in the world, specializing in R&D and manufacturing for DIY, professional, and industrial channels.

The Product Manager will report directly to the VP, Marketing for the Arrow Fastener business.

We are looking for a product manager who thinks like a consumer first and a category manager second: someone who has watched real users struggle with a task, translated that into a product and a price point, and then stayed with it all the way through packaging, content, launch, and sell-through. If you have only managed a spec sheet, this is not the role.

If you have owned an idea from insight to shelf and felt accountable for whether it sold, keep reading. This is a Product Manager role by title, and deliberately so - we want someone still close to the work. It is also the entry point to leading proposition development for a growing portfolio. The person who succeeds here will expand into broader portfolio and platform ownership as the function builds out.

• Spend real time in the market - job sites, retail aisles, user homes, reviews, and search data – and turn what you learn into clearly framed consumer jobs and unmet needs.
• Build and defend the case for what we should and should not develop, using category, competitive, pricing, and channel data rather than opinion.
• Represent the consumer and the retail customer as two distinct audiences, and design propositions that satisfy both.

• Own the lifecycle, revenue, and gross margin performance of an assigned product portfolio, including assortment architecture, good-better-best laddering, pricing, and rationalization.
• Maintain a living roadmap that connects consumer opportunity, channel need, cost targets, and launch timing.
• Make data-driven calls on standard cost, margin structure, and trade-off decisions, and explain them clearly to senior leadership.

• Lead assigned development programs through our staged gate process, from opportunity framing through commitment, validation, specification lock, and launch approval.
• Write the market and product requirements that engineering, industrial design, and sourcing build against - clearly enough that nobody has to guess.
• Help install and hold the process itself: we are actively strengthening our gate discipline, tracking, and decision rights, and we expect this role to improve the system, not just work inside it.

• Build the go-to-market plan with marketing, sales, and digital commerce: positioning, claims hierarchy, key benefits, target shopper, packaging and on-pack story,  content, and launch calendar.
• Partner online reviews and new-account pitches - building the narrative, the assortment recommendation, and the financial story that wins shelf space.
• Track post-launch performance (sell-through, reviews, returns, content quality, share) and act on what the data says.

• Work day-to-day with our Asia-based engineering, R&D, and manufacturing partners on feasibility, cost engineering, samples, tooling timelines, and quality standards.
• Bridge time zones and cultures with clear written specifications, tight follow-up, and documented decisions.
• Travel internationally to partner factories and development centers as programs require.

• 5-7 years of product management, product development, or product marketing experience in consumer products - any consumer category is welcome; hardline, durable, or tool categories are a plus but not required.
• A track record of launched products. You can walk us through consumer launches you personally drove, what you learned, and how they performed…