Head of Product

Waystation AI•Temecula, CA

8d•Onsite

About The Position

Head of Product at Waystation AI, a seed-stage, venture-backed company in Redwood City, CA. Waystation AI is an AI-native platform designed to help food, beverage, supplement, and pet food manufacturers manage supplier communications and procurement data. The platform connects to existing email accounts to automatically structure quotes, specs, COAs, and POs, providing a centralized system of record for procurement, QA, and R&D teams with no required behavior change. The company currently has ten employees, including engineers, BDRs, a founding designer, and the CEO. Waystation AI has paying customers and is looking for a dedicated product leader to inherit and own a newly established product operating system, including a six-lane roadmap, weekly launch cadence, and milestone discipline. This role is crucial for making the current product discipline permanent and ensuring the company's foundational projects are guided by a clear plan.

Requirements

6+ years in product management.
At least one stretch as the senior-most product person at an early-stage startup (seed to Series B).
Experience operating without a playbook and without a team to delegate to.
Shipped B2B SaaS into unglamorous, workflow-heavy industries.
Excellent communicator, both written and verbal, capable of being clear and concise in specs, standups, customer calls, and Slack messages.
Ability to build relationships and trust quickly across the organization and with customers.
Real empathy for customers in procurement, QA, and R&D teams at food and beverage manufacturers.
Proven ability to take ambiguity and create structure.
Sharp analytical skills, with the ability to develop, defend, and revise opinions with data and logic.
Fluency in AI-assisted building and a clear-eyed understanding of its failure modes.
Willingness to run toward hard conversations, including providing critical feedback to engineers, customers, and the founder.
A "chip on your shoulder" and something to prove.

Nice To Haves

Experience building on top of email, documents, or messy unstructured data.
Exposure to supply chain, procurement, or CPG industries.

Responsibilities

Own the why-what-when chain for every project, ensuring alignment with customer or business outcomes, written plans, a designated DRI (Directly Responsible Individual), and dated milestones.
Manage prioritization and effectively say "no" to requests that could derail the roadmap, protecting product lanes and preventing the "run-the-business" lane from consuming all resources.
Establish and maintain launch as a discipline, including product sign-off before deployment, ensuring seeded demo environments are available for sales, and managing release notes, customer communications, and sales enablement for every launch.
Act as the single source of truth for product development, enforcing consistent use of tools like Linear, cutting through AI-generated ticket noise, and ensuring clarity on what matters and why for the engineering team.
Lead discovery efforts and incorporate the customer voice by frequently participating in prospect and customer calls to translate needs into actionable specifications for engineers.
Serve as the accountability layer between the CEO and the team, identifying and driving fixes for project slippage promptly.
Take ownership of the six-lane roadmap and weekly planning from the interim CPO.
Consolidate or eliminate projects that do not earn their lane.
Ensure the CEO is informed of slippage before it occurs.
Establish a routine weekly launch cadence.
Develop the product hiring plan for the next stage of growth, including design, PM, or forward-deployed roles.