Lead Product Strategist

The Role

You are the first product hire. There is no product function to join — the COO is currently doing this job on top of his own, which is why the seat exists.

You will be involved in road map conversations, expected to be the face of Ruxlo with the users and gather feedback, help set priority, make sure the documentation is tight, UAT the work and understand user behavior with tools like mixpanel/posthog.

This is a hands-on individual contributor role. What are the whole surface: every requirement, every acceptance criterion, every scope call, on a product that hasn't shipped yet.

What You'll Own

Deciding what gets built next. Ideas arrive from everywhere: the plan, users, engineering, whoever talked to the CEO last. You triage them against what we're trying to prove this milestone, and you write down why you said no. The no's are the job.

Requirements people can build from. You write the spec, drive every open question to zero before it goes to the approval gate, and get it signed by the lead engineer and the designer. Both of them can block you. That's by design.

Refinement, two sprints out, with design and engineering in the room.

Accepting the work. You test it in staging against the criteria you wrote and you make the go/no-go call on production. Also the release notes.

What happens after. Feedback back into the funnel, tech debt prioritized with engineering, and an honest read on whether the thing you shipped did what you said it would.

Your own AI tooling. Everyone here builds their own. You'll wire up Claude against Linear, Notion, and our analytics to do the drafting and synthesis you'd otherwise do by hand — and you own whether its output is any good.

What You Bring

Must Have

Minimum of 5 years of experience as a Product Manager or Owner in an Agile/Scrum environment.
You've been the whole product function for something real. Title doesn't matter; being the only one does. A startup where you were product hire one, a founder tour, or a thing you built and shipped yourself.

Something we can actually look at: a live product, an app in a store, a spec you wrote that an engineer built from.

Acceptance criteria rigor. You treat a vague requirement as a defect and you find it before anyone writes code.

You use AI in the work, not as a topic. Prompting, evals, agents, whatever you've actually wired up.
Product analytics you've done with your hands defining the events, building the funnel, reading retention and changing your mind because of it.

You've talked to real users recently and you can name a time their answer altered a plan you liked.

Fluency with Scrum ceremonies and the line between what and how.

Ability to be onsite in Manasquan, NJ 4 days/week.

Nice to Have

Something you have built and launched on your own time.
MBA or comparable, paired with the willingness to do unglamorous work anyway.
A two-sided marketplace, or supply-side recruiting — getting people who owe you nothing to show up first.
Consumer products where invitations, reputation, or contribution compound.
Proptech, real estate data, geospatial, construction, or the trades.
CSPO or equivalent.
Who You Are

Somebody entrepreneurial. You've operated without a template and you don't need one. Creative in the specific sense that when the obvious approach is too expensive, you find the one nobody suggested. Comfortable being wrong out loud and fast. Willing to do the small, tedious, unglamorous things yourself because there is nobody to hand it to.

Why Ruxlo

The record doesn't exist yet. Everything about how it gets built, what a homeowner sees first, what makes a contractor bother, what "confirmed" has to mean before anyone trusts it — is unsettled, and you'd be the person settling most of it. Small company, real product, no committee. You'll ship inside your first month and see whether it worked inside your second.