Product Manager, R&D
Gridware
Product
San Francisco, CA, USA
USD 160k-185k / year
Posted on Sep 6, 2025
About Gridware
Gridware is a San Francisco-based technology company dedicated to protecting and enhancing the electrical grid. We pioneered a groundbreaking new class of grid management called active grid response (AGR), focused on monitoring the electrical, physical, and environmental aspects of the grid that affect reliability and safety. Gridware’s advanced Active Grid Response platform uses high-precision sensors to detect potential issues early, enabling proactive maintenance and fault mitigation. This comprehensive approach helps improve safety, reduce outages, and ensure the grid operates efficiently. The company is backed by climate-tech and Silicon Valley investors. For more information, please visit www.Gridware.io.
About the Role
We’re looking for a Senior Product Manager to drive the product definition and delivery of a new customer-facing offering at Gridware. You’ll be the lead (and only) Product Manager focused on this product, leading customer learning, requirements development, and roadmap definition, while partnering with cross-functional leaders who own engineering execution, field operations, and broader program delivery.
This role values technical systems fluency (hardware, software, data science, sensing, and operations) and the ability to translate R&D progress into product scope, tradeoffs, and measurable plans. You do not need deep technical depth in every domain, but you should be comfortable engaging technical partners, asking great questions, and turning complexity into crisp decisions and customer value.
You’ll work closely with technical and non-technical Gridware teams and external utility stakeholders to ensure Gridware delivers trusted, high-impact services to utilities quickly and reliably.
Responsibilities
- Build high-trust relationships with utility customers and serve as a consistent, credible partner to technical and program stakeholders.
- Lead structured customer research and learning to define workflows, personas, success criteria, and adoption barriers.
- Own the product’s “source of truth” by clearly differentiating what is known with high confidence, what’s unknown, and what’s hypothesis—and driving the team toward the next highest-leverage learning.
- Act as an aggregator and catalyst for collective intelligence: mine domain expertise from engineering, applied science, field ops, and customer teams to surface the best ideas and make them actionable.
- Translate R&D outputs into product scope parameters: PRDs/product requirements, constraints, operational readiness needs, and launch criteria.
- Drive operating cadence and clarity across workstreams: roadmap shaping, milestone definition, risk tracking, and decision-making hygiene.
- Drive alignment across teams. Partner cross-functionally to ensure product work interlocks cleanly with existing Gridware operations and delivery mechanisms.
- Build for scale. Evolve early-stage ideas into configurable, repeatable, trusted delivery mechanisms that scale across utilities and use cases.
Required Skills
- 6+ years of product management experience, ideally products at the intersection of software, data, sensing, and operational workflows (hardware/embedded experience a plus).
- Strong customer relationship management skills: you’ve built trust with external stakeholders. You have translated technical constraints and program requirements into clear external commitments and next steps.
- Demonstrated ability to lead structured customer learning (workflows, personas, decision journeys, value hypotheses).
- Strong program/project management and operational execution skills: you can create clarity, drive cadence, and unblock teams. You have experience translating technical progress into product deliverables such as requirements, roadmap tradeoffs, measurable plans like OKRs.
- A stewardship mindset: high discernment, excellent judgment, and a bias toward collective intelligence over “PM as inventor.”
- Technical systems fluency across hardware/software/data/ops: you don’t need deep expertise everywhere, but you can engage credibly, ask sharp questions, and translate complexity into decisions.
- Excellent written and verbal communication: crisp PRDs/specs, decision docs, and stakeholder alignment.
- Demonstrated ability to lead cross-functional teams through ambiguity to product launch.
This describes the ideal candidate; many of us have picked up this expertise along the way. Even if you meet only part of this list, we encourage you to apply!
Benefits
Health, Dental & Vision (Gold and Platinum with some providers plans fully covered)
Paid parental leave
Alternating day off (every other Monday)
“Off the Grid”, a two week per year paid break for all employees.
Commuter allowance
Company-paid training
160000 - 185000 USD a year