Technical Product Manager

Zaden Technologies is looking for a Technical Product Manager to own the critical bridge between engineering execution and customer-ready software. At Zaden, product direction and delivery discipline are the same job — you'll define and protect MVP scope, drive the roadmap, and own the cadence that ships it. Reporting directly to the CEO, this is an individual contributor role with a clear, direct growth path to Head of Product. We're hiring for the function and the skill, not the title — if you've been doing this work under a different name (Senior PM, Product Lead, Technical Program Manager), we want to hear from you.

Note: This position is either hybrid in Huntsville, Alabama or Remote w/ 10-20% travel.

Role Responsibilities:

• Define and hold the MVP cut line for each product — no scope creep, no pre-launch feature drift
• Own and maintain the product roadmap across the full product portfolio in partnership with engineering
• Maintain an always-on demo environment; "demo-able in staging" is your definition of done
• Translate requirements from federal and enterprise customers into prioritized, precise engineering tickets
• Run structured user research and drive product decisions from evidence, not opinion
• Hold the honest line between selling the future and demoing the now
• Coordinate go-to-market timing for each shippable slice with sales and leadership
• Communicate fluidly in two directions — brief program managers in their language, write precise tickets for developers

Required Qualifications:

• U.S. Citizenship and ability to obtain a security clearance
• 5+ years of product management or equivalent product delivery experience
• Demonstrated track record of taking a product from zero to one inside a complex organization with real stakeholders, competing priorities, and constraints
• Proven experience shipping software to paying customers — you know the difference between "capability exists" and "product is ready to sell"
• Technical fluency: able to hold scope conversations with engineers, read a pull request, and recognize when "almost done" is actually weeks away
• Proficiency with roadmap and delivery tools such as Jira, Linear, GitLab, etc
• Hands-on experience with AI assistants and agentic coding tools (e.g., Claude, Cursor, or Copilot) in daily work
• Experience in high-stakes, multi-stakeholder, regulated environments (defense, aerospace, government-adjacent, healthcare, finance, or similar)
• Bachelor's degree in a technical or quantitative field (computer science, software or systems engineering, information systems, electrical or mechanical engineering) or equivalent hands-on product experience

Preferred Qualifications:

• Active security clearance
• Familiarity with DoD, federal research labs, or federal procurement, or enterprise software sold into government
• Experience delivering against government contract schedules or SBIR milestones
• Background in aerospace, defense tech, or engineering automation software
• Exposure to MBSE, systems engineering, or model-based workflows
• Familiarity with MBSE/SysML tooling such as Cameo/MagicDraw or SysML v2
• Proficiency with product analytics tools such as Amplitude or Mixpanel, plus enough SQL to pull your own answers
• Experience with design and collaboration tools: Figma, Miro, Confluence, or Notion
• Cloud platform experience with AWS or Azure (GovCloud a plus)
• Master's degree in a technical field or MBA with a technology focus
• Product or agile certification (CSPO, Pragmatic Institute, or SAFe) or cloud certification (AWS or Azure)

Expected Compensation: $150,000k-$170,000k/yr