Director of Product Management - Trustpoint

Join TrustPoint and Build the World’s First Commercial GPS System in Space

GPS is a ubiquitous global utility in modern society and knowing one’s location is critical for government, commercial, and personal applications. Still, today’s solutions for determining location are inaccurate, slow, unencrypted, and susceptible to jamming and spoofing. These shortcomings make heritage GPS and other government owned systems insufficient for tomorrow’s safety-critical and high-precision applications, a problem TrustPoint intends to solve.

TrustPoint is developing a fully commercial next-generation Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) to provide significant performance, security and reliability improvements for GPS users. This includes better accuracy, quicker Time to First Fix, and anti-spoof and anti-jam capabilities. The improvements will support US Government position and timing service resiliency as well as enable next-generation commercial applications like drone delivery, self-driving cars, urban air mobility, and augmented reality. The over $100B annual GNSS Receiver market is ripe for disruption and TrustPoint intends to lead that revolution with our microsatellite based commercial infrastructure and innovative positioning and timing services.

The Position

With locations outside Washington DC and in Silicon Valley, TrustPoint is currently seeking a full time Director of Product Management to join the team. Reporting to the CEO, the Director of Product Management will build and lead a world class team of product developers, designers and owners, in the market of commercial PNT. The Director of Product Management will be responsible for driving the product strategy, developing supportable business cases for new product, service, and feature development, and ensuring both successful product/service launches and long-term customer satisfaction. In addition to these responsibilities, they will be tasked with actively engaging with external product partners, as well as building the product and service ecosystem to enhance customer value and drive revenue growth.

This leader will own the overall execution, development and evolution, and forward management of all company products and services. They will be expected to perpetually iterate and innovate, determine priorities, develop roadmaps, and manage systems and processes to deliver products that will perform and inspire. The right candidate must be intuitive and fully understand global market demands in both the public and private sectors. Far beyond tactical deliverables, the Director of Product Management will serve as a critical and communicative voice across the company and marketplace. The charter of this role is about understanding the outside market and executing a product roadmap that causes a permanent disruption and the new standard in commercial PNT. As a “go-to-market strategist”, the Director will fully understand PNT sector trends and nuances, competitive threats and risks both real and perceived. Additionally, they will serve collaboratively both with external customers and stakeholders and internal engineering, business development, and sales teams to ensure alignment of product strategy and product and service offerings.

We’ll Expect You To…

• Develop short-term and long-term product strategy, and define the product roadmap and development goals in actionable milestones and deliverables.
• Closely collaborate with external stakeholders, including current and future commercial and government customers, and lead commercial partnerships related to joint product and service development and sales activities
• Closely collaborate with internal, operations, and engineering functions to ensure alignment of product roadmap with company strategy, sales objectives, and technical capabilities.
• Oversee hiring, training, and development of a high performing product team.
• Institutionalize disciplined and effective processes for continuous innovation, including developing product requirements, business case support, and product development execution.
• Design and execute timely and successful product launch campaigns and implement metrics to track and report on market adoption rates.
• Implement processes to ensure institutional learning from mistakes, and for rapid identification of mis-steps, and adjustment and risk mitigation when product development or product launches do not go as planned.
• Manage product budget to maximize effective use of resources in a start-up/emerging company environment.
• Provide feedback to the company’s executive leadership and board of directors on customers, market trends, product and service adoption and competitive threats.

You’ll Need to Have…

• A Bachelor’s degree.
• 10+ years professional product experience with at least 5 years leading product development with responsibility for multiple product lines.
• Experience within the global GNSS market and/or GPS chip technology solutions.
• Experience with global markets, including commercial and government customers.
• Proven track record of transforming a vision into a fully rationalized product.
• Proven ability to build a strong product culture with a commitment to excellence and execution.
• Demonstrated team leadership in developing, mentoring, and retaining a high-performing team.
• Demonstrated understanding of analytic product development.
• Demonstrated ability to work constructively and collaboratively with all company functions.
• Passionate about solving customer problems through new and innovative technology.
• Great communication skills, sense of humor and willingness to do the hard work required to make an early-stage venture successful.
• Excellent presentation skills, ability to communicate and excellent listening skills.
• Strong organizational skills and professional business practices.
• Ability to travel 10-20%.

We’d Like to See…

• Master’s Degree in engineering, mathematics, computer science or similar field.
• Experience with GPS and space technologies is key — preferably with experience at both a large company and a new venture.
• Active TS/SCI Clearance.
• Exposure to defense and intelligence (D&I) ecosystem; Knowledge of US D&I organizations, customers, programs, and needs/requirements.

Cultural Fit

• Thrive in a start-up environment.
• Effective communication style that instills a culture of optimism and positivity.
• Sense of humor and ability to proactively problem solve.
• Encourages colleagues to think and plan strategically while executing well tactically.
• Works well with all company levels and disciplines (i.e. Legal, HR, etc.).
• Willing to “roll up sleeves” in a new venture, working closely with colleagues.

Compensation and Benefits

The selected candidate will be competitively compensated with salary, stock options, and other standard startup benefits.