Head of Product

Waystation AI•Redwood, CA

6d•Onsite

About The Position

Waystation is an AI-native platform that helps food, beverage, supplement, and pet food manufacturers ($50M to $500M revenue) manage supplier communications and procurement data. Email is the UI: we connect to the accounts teams already use, structure every quote, spec, COA, and PO automatically, and give procurement, QA, and R&D one organized system of record with zero behavior change. We're seed-stage, venture-backed, with paying customers including national bakery, supplement, and better-for-you brands. Ten people today: five engineers, three BDRs, a founding designer, and a founder who has done this before (CEO, prior venture-backed company through Series B+). This role exists because Waystation has strong engineers, real customers, and a working AI extraction pipeline that is genuinely hard to replicate, but lacks a dedicated product leader. Product has been managed part-time by a small team, and the company has outgrown this model. An experienced interim CPO has established an operating system including a six-lane roadmap, weekly launch cadence, and milestone discipline. This role will inherit and refine this system, making the discipline permanent. The Head of Product will own the why-what-when chain, ensuring every project ties to a customer or business outcome with a written plan, a DRI, and dated milestones. They will manage prioritization and the ability to say 'no' to protect the roadmap, establish launch as a discipline with product sign-off before deploy, and ensure customer-visible improvements ship weekly. The role also involves maintaining a single source of truth using Linear, cutting through AI-generated ticket noise, and enforcing triage. Discovery and customer voice are key, requiring frequent engagement in prospect and customer calls to translate needs into actionable specs. The Head of Product will serve as the accountability layer between the CEO and the team, identifying and driving fixes for any project slippage.

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, written and verbal, capable of clarity in specs, standups, customer calls, and Slack messages.
Ability to build relationships and trust fast across the organization and with customers.
Real empathy for customers in food and beverage manufacturing (procurement, QA, R&D).
Ability to take ambiguity and create structure from it.
Analytical sharpness, ability to develop and defend opinions with data and logic.
Fluency in AI-assisted building and clear-eyed understanding of its failure modes.
Willingness to review AI-generated specs and tickets.
Ability to run toward hard conversations: telling engineers their estimates aren't credible, telling customers no, and telling the founder he's wrong, while maintaining relationships.
A desire to prove something; 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 all projects, ensuring they tie to customer or business outcomes with written plans, DRIs, and dated milestones.
Manage prioritization and the ability to say 'no' to protect product lanes and prevent scope creep.
Establish launch as a discipline, including product sign-off before deploy, seeded demo environments, release notes, customer comms, and sales enablement for every launch.
Ensure something customer-visible ships every week.
Maintain Linear as a single source of truth, cutting through AI-generated ticket noise and enforcing triage.
Engage frequently in prospect and customer calls to translate needs into engineer-buildable specs.
Serve as the accountability layer between the CEO and the team, identifying and driving fixes for project slippage.
Develop and execute a product hiring plan for the next stage of growth.
Improve estimate accuracy through team practice.
Govern customer-driven scope creep through a framework.
Focus founder's product time on strategy and selling.