What You'll Do:
Shape ideas into testable bets
Partner with stakeholders and executives to capture strategic ideas and turn them into clear hypotheses
Define the problem, the target customer, the business case, and the evidence that would change our minds
Push back constructively when an idea lacks a clear problem or buyer
Plan and run high-volume discovery with customers and prospects, including interviews, workshops, concept tests, and usability sessions
Work with Stakeholders, Sales, and Customer Success to find the right participants quickly
Synthesize findings into short, decision-ready insights
Create interactive prototypes, from clickable concepts to functional PoCs, using AI-assisted tools
Apply sound UX judgment to flows, information architecture, and interaction design
Work with your developer counterpart to draw a clear line between prototype-grade and production-ready, and hand off cleanly
Use PoCs to confirm understanding, not to deliver solutions
Test willingness to adopt and pay, not just whether people like the idea
Define success signals before each validation cycle and track them
Present recommendations to leadership with the evidence behind them
Frame every prototype clearly as exploratory so customers never hear a commitment
Work with Sales and Legal on NDAs, disclosure, and expectation-setting
Keep Sales informed of what you're learning and what is, and isn't, safe to say to customers
Set priorities, rhythm, and working agreements for a small cross-functional team
Share frequent, brief readouts instead of big-bang reviews
Build reusable templates, scripts, and prototype patterns that make each cycle faster
Build or customize solutions for a specific customer
Help customers integrate, configure, or implement our software
Make roadmap or delivery commitments based purely on a PoC
Ship production code (engineering reviews and rebuilds PoCs before anything goes to market)
Lead discovery research
Build proof-of-concept prototypes
Validate against the market
Protect the integrity of the process
Lead the pod
What this role does NOT do
What Success Looks Like:
Ideas reach a go/no-go decision in weeks, not quarters
Ideas the business funds are backed by clear problem definitions, working prototypes, and customer proof
Leadership and Sales trust the evidence and understand why ideas advanced or stopped
Fewer fully built features fail to find demand
Success is measured by the quality of the decision, not by whether an idea moves forward. A well-evidenced "stop" is a win.
What You Bring:
Strong business thinking: markets, buyers, pricing, and ROI, not just usability
Demonstrated rapid prototyping ability, including fluency with AI-assisted building tools
Hands-on discovery research experience and comfort talking directly with customers and prospects, including senior stakeholders
UX and product design fundamentals, with a portfolio or examples of shipped work
Product management experience or equivalent: scoping, prioritization, and stakeholder management
B2B SaaS experience, especially enterprise software
Comfort working in or alongside a live codebase
Experience leading small teams without formal authority
The confidence to tell senior leaders "the evidence doesn't support this"
From a traditional PM: less roadmap ownership, more hypothesis testing, and you build the artifacts yourself
From a UX Designer: you own the business case and market validation, not just the experience
Core skills
Also valuable
How this role is different
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