🏎️ TLDR: Cognyx, an early-stage VC-backed tech (SaaS) company, is seeking a Founding Product Manager to join our "Founding Team". This key role involves shaping the product vision, driving product development, and ensuring customer satisfaction.
📌 Location(s): Paris (60%), client location (20%, likely in Paris), WFH (20%). Remote work is not offered for this position.
💶 Salary range: 65-100k€ + BSPCE (1st batch, 0.5-1%) + intéressement bonus (2-3 months salary upon reaching ARR milestones at company level). Usual French perks. Quick salary progression, tied with fundraising and/or growth milestones.
📑 Type of Contract: CDI (Contrat à Durée Indéterminée), usual SYNTEC branch perks.
👏 Direct reporting line: Co-Founder & CEO (Matthias Berahya-Lazarus).
Cognyx in a nutshell
Our ambition: empower thousands of industrial and manufacturing companies to design and engineer hardware products at software speed!
What we’re building: Cognyx designs groundbreaking SaaS technology to help organizations accelerate their time-to-market, reduce manufacturing errors, and streamline engineering processes. Leveraging the power of Knowledge Graphs and AI, Cognyx enhances engineers' daily work by reconciling Product & Engineering data across different systems, helping them to collaborate faster, and automate some of their engineering work.
Where we come from: Cognyx is an early-stage VC-backed tech company. It was born just a few months ago, in Sept-23, from repeat founders Matthias & Deon. They partnered up with OSS Ventures, a leading startup studio that successfully launched 20 software startups in the Manufacturing space, including category-defining companies such as Fabriq and Mercateam. After a fast take-off in Sales, securing major contracts just a few months after inception, Cognyx quickly secured a significant pre-seed funding round from a major VC (soon to be announced), and a panel of renowned business angels from the Tech and Manufacturing spaces.
Who we are: today, Cognyx is mostly composed of its 2 senior cofounders along with employees of OSS Ventures who helped us build the 1st version of our tech. By joining us in the very early days, that means you will be part of our “Founding Team”: your individual contribution will have a decisive impact and define our future trajectory. During the next months, we will also get to define the company culture together — and we do aim to create one where it's (really) good to work. Among the values we already established in our short life as cardinal: Team spirit (we will fail or succeed as a group), Excellence (we don’t settle for “mediocre” or “average”), Sincerity (we tell the truth to others, and to ourselves).
To find out more: you can visit our website or LinkedIn page! You can also learn more about our original startup studio OSS Ventures
About the role
Why we need you?
Cognyx is a powerful platform, solving highly complex organizational and engineering challenges. However, it is not a simple "off the shelf" SaaS solution. The success of our Product lies in our ability to understand the intricacies of Hardware engineering, the specificity of manufacturing data structures, and the detailed workflows of a complicated value chain from design to production. Not only do we need to understand things as they are today, but also as they should be tomorrow — if they were not constrained by existing silos & legacy technologies.
We are looking for an outstanding professional who can not only understand these unique customer needs, but who can also shape our product strategy to meet these needs and work closely with our engineering team to bring this strategy to life.
What you’ll do?
In a nutshell: As our Founding Product Manager, you'll be responsible for setting the product vision and strategy, and driving the product development in order to deliver outstanding impact and satisfaction for our Enterprise clients. This will require understanding customer needs, working with the engineering team to build and refine our product, and working closely with our Sales team (= currently our CEO) to bring our Product to market. Your mission is to compile fragmented data points and disconnected streams of thoughts into cohesive understanding. What the most important problem is, what the data means, what the Product truly needs next, what the structure of information should be, how and when AI should be incorporated, what users are motivated by… in short, where the maximal impact is. Then, you should be able to translate this vision into actionable, best-effort technology for a clear fast impact, through the delivery of the technological backlog. And lastly, to execute Product operations in order to move towards these goals.
Broadly speaking: the Founding Product Manager is a strategic role that requires a deep understanding of our market, customers, and technology. You will be responsible for shaping the product roadmap, removing all blockers to make sure it is delivered timely, and ensuring as a result that our Product meets and exceeds customer expectations.
On a day to day basis, as a Founding Product Manager, you can expect to:
- Define and drive the product strategy and roadmap, based on a deep understanding of our customers, market, and technology.
- Work closely with the engineering team to build and refine our product, ensuring that it meets customer needs and is easy to deploy.
- Deeply interact with clients and users to understand their needs, gather feedback, and ensure that our product is delivering value.
- Champion and pilot the adoption of Agile methodologies, particularly sprint planning and retrospectives, to improve product development processes and ensure timely delivery of product features.
- Translate all of the above into maximal-impact features through discussions with our tech team, while minimizing the technical effort to get there.
- Build all relevant deliverables needed to accelerate clarity and alignment in our Product efforts (eg. Roadmap, wireframes, Figma’s, designs, benchmarks, etc).
Although this is less central to your role, you will also be expected to:
- Compile various different information streams (competition, client discussions, adjacencies, internal feedback) to have a clear picture of where the product stands, and where it should go to gain more value and more differentiation;
- Collaborate with the sales team to bring our product to market, ensuring that our product messaging and positioning is compelling and accurate.
- Collaborate with customer success and support teams to understand customer issues, and work with the engineering team to sort them out quickly;
- Participate in product-focused Sales calls, or even jump in deployment processes when extra hands are needed on deck!
Who you’ll be working with:
As one of our very first employees, you can expect to work closely with each member of our “Founding Team”, a team of 8-10 people who will define our technology, our culture, our value proposition, our processes. This should be an exciting human & professional experience! You’ll be reporting into Matthias, our CEO. Matthias is a very experienced founder, with proven leadership skills acquired during his 20 years of experience in Tech.
Why it’ll be fun & interesting to do with us:
Because… there is no one else doing this job! You’ll be an essential reason why the Product is a stunning one — or just average. We will also put a strong emphasis on making sure you are building new skills, whether in terms of hard skills, tech abilities and leadership. Our experienced founding team will be there to provide extensive guidance & coaching.
What’s next?
As one of our very first employees and a member of our “Founding Team”, there will be many opportunities to grow in expertise and/or leadership in the months & years to come. Cognyx aims at a high growth rate, so this could come as fast as 6-12 months from now!