Commercial Product Director
About Whitespace Solutions
Whitespace Solutions blends gaming principles with tailored algorithms, self-learning AI, and highly tailored user interfaces. This is how they help domain experts and senior leaders make significantly better decisions.
Game AI mimics the human ability to learn from experience and has become famous for achieving top performance in games such as chess and poker. Whitespace Solutions proves that Game AI can also add significant business value and transform ways of working – while humans remain in control.
Whitespace Solutions, founded by two former Shell employees, operates globally with a very international team. The company was originally mainly active in oil and gas, leveraging its solutions for well and field planning. Increasingly, they’ve expanded to support clients in logistics, renewable energy, and healthcare fields. Their mission is to radically improve decision-making in organizations, from daily operations to long-term planning and strategy. Ultimately, any business where capacity planning, workflow efficiency, or insight generation is of strategic importance is a potential client for Whitespace Solutions. Using the company’s solutions, clients can reduce operating costs, improve their asset management, optimize staff efficiency, and reduce fuel usage, and more.
Whitespace Solutions is now developing a product line for resource planning: maintenance and logistics. This is a logical next step that fits well with the company’s expertise and meets the needs of its current customers. But it has potential applications in other areas as well. The Commercial Product Director will explore and create these to allow Whitespace Solutions to market new propositions and enter new industries.
Requirements*
- Over 10 years of experience
- In product management
- Or in business development
- Within heavy industry, maintenance planning, or logistics
- Structuring and simplifying complex issues
- Strong project and team management skills
- Building trust with industry leaders
Research shows that while male candidates feel confident enough to apply when they meet about 60% of the requirements, female candidates only apply when they tick every box. So if this role has your name on it, but you’re not sure about the criteria, we still want to hear from you.
At Whitespace Solutions, what makes us special is that we focus on delivery and pushing boundaries, while believing that trust is more important than protocol. And that frequent, candid feedback is the key to personal and professional success.
Commercial Product Director
The Commercial Product Director will create and sustain a new business line of AI-assisted planning solutions and drive business development around these, with a special focus on maintenance and logistics planning use cases. They will be responsible for end-to-end product and business development, pricing strategy, contracting, project delivery, and customer support. The Director will join the Management Team and report to the company’s founders and managing partners, while leading product developer teams.
Performing market research and segmentation is a crucial part of this role by identifying potential customer groups where resource planning technology can add value. The Commercial Product Director will also generate specific propositions for each of these areas to leverage scalable backend technology into tailored, industry-specific applications. They also lead product positioning, devise a go-to-market strategy, and manage marketing. In addition, they will lead project delivery.
Management responsibilities
The Commercial Product Director shows strong leadership and stakeholder management skills. On the technical side, they communicate and translate customer needs to the technical team, monitor progress against the roadmap, and communicate clearly to keep development teams accountable, while enabling them to deliver. On the commercial side, they will lead commercial negotiations and contracting discussions.
They also manage the product line’s KPIs: maintaining its resource plan, tracking and managing financial goals and performance, improving the existing roadmap based on market insights, and creating and managing the long-term development roadmap.
In this role, a versatile and analytical product director, product marketer, or business developer with technology and strategy experience will have the opportunity to establish an entirely new product line and serve several new customer groups. Ideally, they deliver a network with potential new customers from the get-go. This is how they can contribute to Whitespace Solutions’ mission: radically improving decision-making in organizations, from daily operations to long-term planning and strategy.
More information?
Curious if this role is right for you? View the full job profile for more details about the responsibilities, the team, and what we're looking for in a candidate.
This position has been filled
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