Product Manager

Arcessio is building product for physical and AI-native manufacturing workflows, and this role is designed to be the first dedicated product hire. You will lead customer discovery, UX and product design, and end-to-end product management as a senior individual contributor in an early-stage environment, reporting to the Chief Product & Technology Officer. The focus is translating real manufacturing and engineering constraints into an agentic, AI-first experience that teams can build and customers can adopt.

What you’ll do

• Run customer interviews and site visits with mechanical and manufacturing engineers to understand how products progress from design through manufacturing and sourcing.
• Learn the logic behind engineering choices, including geometry, tolerances, materials, process selection, cost, lead time, quality, and production constraints.
• Convert customer workflows, pain points, and unmet needs into product opportunities, priorities, and actionable direction.
• Build a continuous discovery habit so product decisions are grounded in what customers actually need.
• Develop enough domain depth that engineers feel the product is built by people who understand how they work.
• Own the end-to-end user experience, including information architecture, user flows, wireframes, high-fidelity screens, and functional prototypes.
• Design agentic, AI-first experiences that simplify complex manufacturing and engineering decisions and minimize training or support.
• Design for trust by helping users understand recommendation reasoning, where uncertainty exists, and when human judgment should stay in the loop.
• Set and maintain the quality bar for usability and visual craft as the product and team grow.
• Prototype and validate solutions quickly using AI-native tools before committing meaningful engineering time.
• Turn validated concepts into a roadmap, product requirements, user stories, acceptance criteria, and engineering tickets.
• Partner with engineering from definition through QA and launch, making tradeoffs quickly and keeping delivery on track.
• Own product outcomes across activation, engagement, retention, customer value, and revenue impact.
• Own the product roadmap by deciding what to build and in what order, including the rationale and tradeoffs.
• Reconcile competing priorities across PLG users, enterprise customers, DoD programs, suppliers, and engineering.
• Distinguish between customer-specific requests and scalable capabilities that belong in the core platform.

What you’ll bring

• 7+ years across product management, product design, engineering, or a hybrid of these disciplines, including meaningful experience in early-stage or 0 to 1 environments.
• A track record of taking products from ambiguous customer problems to shipped solutions, not just planning or handing off requirements.
• Strong affinity for physical-product development.
• A degree in Mechanical Engineering, Manufacturing Engineering, Product Design, Robotics, or a related technical discipline is highly valued but not required.
• Equivalent hands-on experience building, testing, manufacturing, or shipping physical products is also of interest.
• Real design skill, with the ability to go from blank canvas to information architecture, user flows, and high-fidelity screens in the tool that gets you there fastest, and to explain the judgment behind your choices.
• Strong customer discovery skills, including running interviews yourself, being comfortable going onsite, listening well, and separating what customers say from what they actually need.
• Sound product judgment to reconcile customer needs, technical constraints, and business goals, including the ability to say no to good ideas that do not align to priority.
• Fluency with AI-native prototyping and development tools such as Cursor, Claude, Lovable, Replit, v0, or similar, plus a habit of adopting better tools quickly.
• Enough technical fluency to work closely with engineers, understand APIs, integrations, data flows, and implementation tradeoffs, and produce engineering-ready requirements.
• Familiarity with agentic products, AI-assisted workflows, human-in-the-loop systems, or AI evaluation is strongly preferred.
• A self-directed, low-ego operating style that supports moving fast with incomplete information, communicating clearly, and closing loops.
• Curiosity about how things are designed and made, including interest in why engineers choose specific materials, geometry, tolerances, or processes.

Technologies

• Cursor, Claude, Lovable, Replit, v0, APIs

What success looks like

• Mechanical and manufacturing engineers feel Arcessio understands how they actually work.
• Customers reach value faster because the product is intuitive, useful, and easy to adopt.
• Customer insight translates into a focused roadmap tied to measurable business outcomes.
• Activation, engagement, retention, expansion, and revenue improve as the product gets better.
• Important product questions are answered through prototypes and customer validation before expensive engineering work begins.
• Engineering receives clear priorities and crisp requirements, enabling the team to ship high-quality product on time.
• Customer-specific learnings turn into scalable product capabilities rather than one-off solutions.
• You help establish a faster, AI-native product development model that becomes part of Arcessio’s long-term advantage.

Location: Oakland, CA (onsite)
Minimum experience: 7 years
Education: Mechanical Engineering, Manufacturing Engineering, Product Design, Robotics, or a related technical discipline