Founding Product Manager — YC-backed AI Startup

About Cerrion

At Cerrion, we’re building the future of AI-enabled manufacturing. Headquartered in Zurich and backed by Y Combinator and top Silicon Valley investors, we’re building a platform to deploy video AI Agents that can see what’s happening on the production floor, automatically spot problems, and instantly intervene to keep lines running smoothly, at scale. Our technology is live in factories across 15 countries, helping leading manufacturers in glass, beverage, food, CPG, building materials and wood cut downtime by up to 50%. We’ve reached an exciting inflection point — and we’re accelerating fast.

Role Summary

We’re hiring our first Product Manager to turn the product vision for Cerrion’s AI Agents platform into an actionable roadmap that translates customer pain points into features that deliver measurable value. We are looking for a unicorn to bring founder-style ownership of the end-to-end product lifecycle, with the right mix of product management, product marketing, and a strategic vision coupled with an unparalleled pragmatism and bias for action. You’ll work directly with our founders to set strategy, manage the technical development team, and own the success of the product from concept to launch. In parallel, you’ll tell a clear story about the product to the market, partnering closely with Sales and Marketing to make sure our video AI agents resonate with target industries. This is a rare opportunity to build the Product function from scratch with a path to Head of Product.

Responsibilities

Business‑as‑Usual (Own and Improve)

• Product strategy & roadmap: Develop and continuously refine the product roadmap that aligns with company objectives and customer needs. Prioritize features based on impact and feasibility, ensuring a balance between near‑term wins and long‑term platform investments.

• Cross‑functional leadership: Work hand‑in‑hand with Engineering, GTM, Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success to ensure strategic alignment and smooth execution. Run weekly planning and stand‑ups; coordinate sprints; remove blockers.

• Customer discovery & user research: Speak regularly with our customers to understand their workflows, pain points and success metrics. Translate insights into clear product requirements and user stories.

• Product design & UX: Ensure that our platform is intuitive, trustworthy and delightful to use. Work with vibe coding tools and collaborate with designers to create prototypes and high‑fidelity experiences; advocate for simplicity and clarity, representing our end users and keeping their goals and pain points always in mind.

• Metrics & analytics: Define and track key product metrics (e.g., deployment time, adoption, retention, usage, customer ROI). Conduct post‑launch analyses and iterate based on data.

• Storytelling & enablement: Translate features into clear narratives for the market. Support Marketing in crafting messaging, demos and launch materials. Partner with Sales to ensure product positioning resonates and gather feedback on MQL/SQL quality and conversion.

• Product operations: Implement lightweight processes for product backlog management, requirements documentation, release notes and user feedback loops. Evaluate and introduce modern product tools for roadmapping, prototyping and issue tracking.

Strategic Initiatives (Build for Scale)

• Vision & innovation: Work together with the founders to establish the long-term vision of our AI Agents platform for manufacturing, exploring new use cases and verticals beyond our current footprint. Benchmark competitor offerings and emerging AI technologies to inform our roadmap.

• AI & platform investment: Work with the founders to shape the underlying platform strategy (data models, ML/AI infrastructure, integrations) to ensure scalability and modularity. Work with technical leads to decide on major architectural improvements.

• Market expansion & positioning: Work with the founders on product exploration for new industries and geographies, considering regulatory and cultural nuances. Identify which customer segments to prioritize and how to localize the product for multi‑country deployment.

• Partnerships & ecosystem: Contribute to the identification & evaluation of strategic partnerships that accelerate product adoption or add complementary capabilities.

• Future team & leadership: Help define the future structure of the product organization. Build a product culture that balances experimentation with rigorous execution.

Qualifications

• Experience: 4–8 years in product management, ideally in AI/ML, computer‑vision or industrial SaaS/IIoT. Demonstrated success owning a product from concept through launch and iteration.

• Technical fluency: Comfort discussing architecture, data pipelines and AI/ML concepts with engineers. You don’t have to code daily, but you understand how to make trade‑offs and write clear specs.

• Customer obsession: Strong track record of talking to customers, distilling insights and building features that drive adoption and retention.

• Storytelling & marketing insight: Able to translate technical capabilities into value propositions; experienced in supporting go‑to‑market teams with messaging and product narratives.

• Cross‑functional leadership: Experience working multidisciplinary teams; strong project management and communication skills; ability to persuade without authority.

• Data‑driven: Skilled at defining success metrics, running experiments and using data to inform decisions. Familiar with analytics tools and A/B testing.

• Bias to action: Comfortable operating in an ambiguous, fast‑moving environment; pragmatic and hands‑on; willing to dive into details while keeping the bigger picture in mind.

• Nice to have: Background in manufacturing, robotics or industrial automation; design sensibilities; familiarity with AI‑powered user experiences; multilingual (German/French/Italian) for European market engagement.

Why Join Cerrion?

• Ownership & impact: Be the architect of our product vision and the chief advocate for our users. Your work will shape the future of autonomous manufacturing.

• Growth path: This role can be a stepping stone to becoming the Head of Product at Cerrion.

• Culture: We operate with flat hierarchies and a get‑things‑done mentality. You’ll work with ambitious colleagues from all over the world in a collaborative environment where the best idea wins.

• Compensation & equity: Competitive salary, meaningful equity package and comprehensive benefits.

• Location: Modern office in the heart of Zurich; enjoy the quality of life of Switzerland and the dynamism of a high‑growth startup.

If you’re passionate about crafting narratives, building growth engines from scratch and leaving a mark on a massive industry, we’d love to meet you.