Senior Product Manager (m/f/d)

Rolle

Hive Robotics is building Europe’s first full-stack orchestration platform for unmanned systems: connecting, controlling, and commanding multi-vendor drone and robot swarms. Our RF communication systems are Made in Germany, deployed on active frontlines, and targeting a highly valued tactical communication market with zero sovereign alternatives today. As our first dedicated Senior Product Manager, you own the path from customer need to released product: you work directly with customers to understand their missions and their technical and operational constraints, translate what you learn into structured requirements our engineers can build against, and keep delivery on track along the way. Today, product knowledge lives across founders and engineers. Your job is to turn it into a managed asset: a clear requirement base and a product configuration catalogue that sales, engineering, and production all work from. You report to the CTO. This role is customer-facing by design: expect to spend around 20–30% of your time traveling, working with customers and end-users alongside our sales team. The rest of your week is on-site in Munich, close to the engineers building the product. Verantwortlichkeiten

Customer Requirements & Discovery

• Engage directly with customers and end-users alongside our sales team: understand their missions, concepts of operations, and real technical and operational constraints first-hand
• Drill broad customer wishes down to concrete, testable requirements: capture conops, use cases, and acceptance criteria during the session
• Assess feasibility with engineering before anything is promised, you are the one who says what the product can and cannot do
• Own the feedback loop from the field: turn what deployed systems teach us into roadmap decisions
• Bring market and competitive insight into positioning and pricing decisions, together with sales and finance

Requirements Management

• Translate customer and market needs into structured requirements engineering can build against: PRDs, specifications and acceptance criteria
• Own prioritization: decide what gets built next and defend the trade-offs to customers, engineers, and management alike
• Keep every requirement traceable from customer conversation to released feature, including what was deliberately not built, and why

Product Configuration Catalogue

• Build our product configuration catalogue from the ground up: variants, options, and valid combinations as the single source of truth for what Hive offers
• Keep sales, engineering, and production working from the same catalogue. What is quoted is what can be built, configured, and supported
• Own catalogue changes end to end: when a variant is added, changed, or retired, you make sure every function knows what that means for them
• Make sure every variant carries its regulatory and commercial status: product compliance, quality requirements, and export control classification are known before anything is quoted
• Manage product lifecycle decisions with engineering and supply chain, including component obsolescence and end-of-life planning

Delivery Accountability

• Own development timelines: turn commitments into plans with named owners and dates, and keep releases on track
• Create accountability through transparency: surface slippage early, bring the trade-off to a decision, and communicate status honestly in both directions
• Drive release readiness across engineering, quality, and production 
• Keep production reality in view: factor lead times, ramp-up plans, and delivery commitments into roadmap and catalogue decisions, in close coordination with operations

Processes & Documentation

• Build the product management foundation as our first dedicated PM: requirements repository, decision records, roadmap, and release documentation that outlive any single head
• Choose and introduce the product tooling as we grow: pragmatic now, scalable later
• Grow the product function’s processes with headcount: what works at 25 people must still work at 60

Anforderungen

This is a broad and demanding role, and we know that. You do not need to tick every box or master every topic from day one. If the core is there and you have the drive to grow into the rest, we want to hear from you. Must Have

• 5+ years in product management for hardware, robotics, or comparable deep-tech products, ideally in a growing company
• Proven ability to translate customer needs into structured engineering requirements (PRDs, specifications, acceptance criteria)
• Track record of shipping products through the full lifecycle from discovery through launch and post-launch iteration
• Strong technical fluency: you hold your own in hardware and software discussions with engineers
• Hands-on experience with project management tools, for example Jira
• Outstanding communication: as effective in a customer workshop as in an engineering planning session, in writing and in person
• Execution mindset: you treat a slipping timeline as a problem to surface today, not at the next steering meeting
• Willingness to undergo security vetting for customer-site and defense-related work
• Fluent English
• Based in Munich or willing to relocate

Nice to Have

• Advanced German
• Experience with requirements-management and configuration/PLM tooling
• Prior work in defence, aerospace, security, or another regulated environment
• Experience building a product management function from scratch rather than inheriting one

About us

Why Hive

• Real ownership from day one in a fast-scaling deep-tech company with products already in serial production and in the field.
• Work on sovereign European technology that matters, at the intersection of robotics, RF, and autonomy.
• Small, high-caliber team with short decision paths and direct access to founders and architects.
• Modern office in Munich with the tooling and equipment you need to do your best work.