What You'll Do:
-
Shape ideas into testable bets
-
Partner with stakeholders and executives to capture strategic ideas and turn them into clear hypotheses
-
Define the problem, the target customer, the business case, and the evidence that would change our minds
-
Push back constructively when an idea lacks a clear problem or buyer
-
Plan and run high-volume discovery with customers and prospects, including interviews, workshops, concept tests, and usability sessions
-
Work with Stakeholders, Sales, and Customer Success to find the right participants quickly
-
Synthesize findings into short, decision-ready insights
-
Create interactive prototypes, from clickable concepts to functional PoCs, using AI-assisted tools
-
Apply sound UX judgment to flows, information architecture, and interaction design
-
Work with your developer counterpart to draw a clear line between prototype-grade and production-ready, and hand off cleanly
-
Use PoCs to confirm understanding, not to deliver solutions
-
Test willingness to adopt and pay, not just whether people like the idea
-
Define success signals before each validation cycle and track them
-
Present recommendations to leadership with the evidence behind them
-
Frame every prototype clearly as exploratory so customers never hear a commitment
-
Work with Sales and Legal on NDAs, disclosure, and expectation-setting
-
Keep Sales informed of what you're learning and what is, and isn't, safe to say to customers
-
Set priorities, rhythm, and working agreements for a small cross-functional team
-
Share frequent, brief readouts instead of big-bang reviews
-
Build reusable templates, scripts, and prototype patterns that make each cycle faster
-
Build or customize solutions for a specific customer
-
Help customers integrate, configure, or implement our software
-
Make roadmap or delivery commitments based purely on a PoC
-
Ship production code (engineering reviews and rebuilds PoCs before anything goes to market)
Lead discovery research
Build proof-of-concept prototypes
Validate against the market
Protect the integrity of the process
Lead the pod
What this role does NOT do
What Success Looks Like:
Success is measured by the quality of the decision, not by whether an idea moves forward. A well-evidenced "stop" is a win.
-
Ideas reach a go/no-go decision in weeks, not quarters
-
Ideas the business funds are backed by clear problem definitions, working prototypes, and customer proof
-
Leadership and Sales trust the evidence and understand why ideas advanced or stopped
-
Fewer fully built features fail to find demand
What You Bring:
Core skills
-
Strong business thinking: markets, buyers, pricing, and ROI, not just usability
-
Demonstrated rapid prototyping ability, including fluency with AI-assisted building tools
-
Hands-on discovery research experience and comfort talking directly with customers and prospects, including senior stakeholders
-
UX and product design fundamentals, with a portfolio or examples of shipped work
-
Product management experience or equivalent: scoping, prioritization, and stakeholder management
-
B2B SaaS experience, especially enterprise software
-
Comfort working in or alongside a live codebase
-
Experience leading small teams without formal authority
-
The confidence to tell senior leaders "the evidence doesn't support this"
-
From a traditional PM: less roadmap ownership, more hypothesis testing, and you build the artifacts yourself
-
From a UX Designer: you own the business case and market validation, not just the experience
Also valuable
How this role is different