Lead Product Manager

Instrumental, Inc.•Palo Alto, CA

1d•$210,000 - $298,000

About The Position

Instrumental builds a Manufacturing Acceleration Platform that combines factory signals, performance data, and context to improve manufacturing yield and throughput. As a Lead Product Manager, you will work directly with customer engineers to understand their workflows, translate their expertise into product capabilities, and measure the value those capabilities deliver. The product spans AI software, vision hardware, and forward-deployed services, and your solutions will integrate these to improve outcomes on customer manufacturing lines. You will collaborate closely with customers and internal experts to identify and size opportunities, set priorities, and own outcomes. The role calls for sound judgment in deciding what to build and a focus on building the right product quickly and well. You will investigate customer workflows, equipment, data, and constraints; set targets for product performance, market fit, and value; and make priorities, trade-offs, success criteria, roadmaps, and decisions visible across the organization. You will prototype with AI, run field trials, test assumptions, simplify solutions, and deliver useful improvements quickly. You will define product quality and trust in collaboration with domain experts, validate automated judgments against expert judgment and real operating conditions, and design ways for users to verify, correct, and recover from outputs, including when human approval is required. You will also develop reusable guidance and product-work harnesses, track outcomes, resolve deployment barriers with relevant teams, and turn failures and field learnings into repeatable, tested improvements. The role includes travel up to 25%. The representative annual base salary range for the Bay Area is $210,000–$298,000; level and salary are evaluated during the interview process.

Requirements

At least 8 years of hands-on product management or founder experience at an early- or mid-stage startup, with significant ownership of a product offering.
Experience thriving in high-risk, uncertain environments and demonstrating startup DNA.
A record of spending 20% or more of working time with customers week after week as a core part of product practice.
Demonstrated ability to earn the trust of technical customer stakeholders.
Ability to learn unfamiliar domains quickly.
Ability to understand complex customer datasets, including spreadsheet analysis, basic statistics, and database queries.
Strong product judgment and human-centric storytelling; thoughtful use of AI tools and discernment against low-quality AI output.
Fluency with leading-edge AI tools and AI-driven collaboration and productivity practices, and ability to help teammates use them to make better decisions, understand customers, and do useful work.

Responsibilities

Investigate customer engineers’ workflows, equipment, data, and constraints, and use those learnings in prioritization and product storytelling.
Set targets for product performance, market fit, and value, and drive progress toward them.
Make priorities, trade-offs, success criteria, roadmaps, and decisions visible across the organization.
Prototype with AI, run field trials, test assumptions, reduce complexity, and deliver useful improvements quickly.
Define quality and trust with domain experts, build evaluations and context, and validate automated judgments against expert judgment and real operating conditions.
Design how users verify, correct, and recover from outputs, including determining when human approval is required.
Build reusable guidance and product-work harnesses with clear decision boundaries and maintenance ownership.
Turn field learning into repeatable capabilities.
Track outcomes, resolve deployment barriers with relevant teams, turn failures into tested improvements, and close the loop with contributors.
Travel up to 25%.