Product Manager in Sonoma, California

Product Manager, Commercial Hardware

We've partnered with a well-resourced hardware company on a mission to take a serious bite out of food waste, turning everyday kitchen scraps into a reusable resource rather than landfill. Having proven the concept in the home, they are now bringing the technology into commercial kitchens: restaurants, institutional food service, and beyond. It is a real, physical product moving from late-stage development into commercial launch, with early customers already in the field and a roadmap of new SKUs and accessories ahead.

This is a rare opportunity to own a commercial hardware program end to end, from current development through customer launch to the next generation of products. You'll be accountable for defining what the product should do and why, then keeping Engineering, Operations and Sales rowing in the same direction week after week. It is a true execution seat for someone who loves the details, thrives on hard tradeoffs, and gets energy from closing the loop between the field and the factory.

As a Product Manager, Commercial Hardware, you will:

• Define and maintain clear product requirements across the full cycle, from the current hardware phase through commercial launch, grounded in customer needs, field learnings and business constraints.
• Partner deeply with Mechanical, Electrical, Systems and Firmware Engineering and with Industrial Design so the product looks, feels and performs the way commercial customers expect.
• Champion cost, user experience, serviceability and reliability, making and documenting the hard product decisions in weekly hardware and program reviews.
• Turn field learnings into improvements fast with Operations, and translate what early customers need into deployment-ready requirements with Sales.
• Own the roadmap beyond Gen 1, including accessories, and define the metrics that track both development and in-market performance.

• You have 5 to 7 years in product management, with at least 3 on hardware or electromechanical products, and you've taken a product through late-stage development, pilot and into commercial deployment.
• You're a strong cross-functional executor with real executive presence: you keep Engineering, Operations and Sales aligned, run meetings that produce clear decisions, and communicate cleanly both up to leadership and down to the ground.
• You have genuine technical depth: comfortable in a room full of engineers, able to engage on tradeoffs and knowing when to escalate, even though you're not designing the hardware yourself.
• You've supported early field deployments, you know what breaks in the real world, and you close the feedback loop quickly.
• One of these backgrounds fits you: a PM from large-scale commercial hardware where you owned the whole product end to end, for example commercial coffee or brewing equipment, aerial or nautical drones, ebikes, or powered mopeds. Large scale plus full ownership is what matters, so consumer handheld devices or single-module automotive experience alone won't be enough.

Nice to have: experience with commercial food service, institutional kitchens or food waste equipment; field-serviceable or IoT-connected hardware; or time at an early-stage hardware startup.

You'll be based in the San Francisco Bay Area, or ready to relocate there, and comfortable working onsite. Candidates already authorised to work in the US are ideal; a visa situation is not an automatic barrier, though straightforward authorisation is preferred given current processing timelines.