Product Lead

Job description

[Beacon](https://beaconsoftware.com/) is building the essential technology infrastructure for the everyday economy: the businesses, organizations, and services that make real life work, and that mainstream tech has largely left behind. We acquire, operate, and grow vertical market software companies — niche, founder-built businesses serving industries that are often overlooked and too profitable to ignore. Our model is simple: we seek out founders who have built their business by spending years understanding their market and prioritizing their customers' specific needs. We buy great businesses, invest in their continued growth, and hold them permanently — accelerating that growth with an AI-native platform built specifically for vertical market software. No mandate to cut, flip, or roll up into something unrecognizable. We are not a financial firm. We are technology entrepreneurs and operators who believe the most important businesses in the world are already running quietly in industries most people never think about. Our job is to find them, support the people who built them, and make them better. Beacon is backed by a diverse base of investors, with $550M+ raised to date, including General Catalyst, Lightspeed, D1 Capital, CPMG, the family offices of the founders of Stripe, DoorDash, and Ramp, and evergreen funds built for the long game. **About the role** You'll join Beacon's Portfolio Product team — a cross-functional group of Product Managers, Engineers, Designers, GTM experts, and Data Scientists working directly with our 40+ portfolio companies and counting (at roughly one new acquisition per week) to drive measurable outcomes through AI and software. At the core, every PM at Beacon owns product outcomes for 2 to 5 portfolio companies at a time, acting as a hands-on, founding product leader embedded in each business. You'll sit close to the GM, the operators, and the customers, figure out where the leverage is, and ship software directly into the business. The best PMs don't just deliver for the companies they're deployed at — they compress what they learn into reusable playbooks that spread to every other portfolio company in the same vertical. The ultimate objective is to transform our portfolio companies into unicorns! For the right candidates, this role grows beyond individual ownership. As your vertical scales, you may build and lead a team of PMs, take on hiring and coaching responsibilities, and become the person who sets product vision and standards across an entire industry segment — partnering directly with GMs, founders & operators, and driving planning across the whole portfolio. How much of that path applies to you depends on your background and trajectory, and we'll shape the role around what you bring. This is not a consulting role. We ship software, not slides. The deliverable is a running system. **Key Responsibilities** - Own product outcomes for 2 to 5 portfolio companies simultaneously, acting as a fractional/founding product leader embedded in each business - Lead quarterly and annual planning, helping teams set product visions and translate them into achievable goals - Build and maintain roadmaps that balance customer needs, business goals, and technical constraints - Drive sprint planning and execution, improving team velocity and predictability over time - Develop prioritization frameworks that help CEOs and operators make better product decisions - Build customer feedback systems that turn qualitative inputs into actionable roadmap decisions - Coordinate feature launches across engineering, sales, marketing, and support - Coach developers, designers, and early PMs to think like product managers - Distill learnings into cross-portfolio playbooks that scale impact beyond your assigned companies - Partner with GMs, founders, and operators to set product vision and translate it into executable roadmaps - Contribute to Beacon's broader AI platform by surfacing patterns and opportunities from your companies **As your scope grows you may also**: - Build and lead a team of PMs, hiring, onboarding, and developing them as your portfolio scales - Codify cross-portfolio playbooks that turn individual wins into repeatable systems across an entire vertical - Set the bar for how great product work looks at Beacon — spec quality, customer discovery, prioritization rigor - Own product strategy and outcomes across a defined vertical, not just individual companies **What We're Looking For** - BA/BS degree; MBA a plus - 4+ years of product management experience, ideally in B2B SaaS (senior candidates typically bring 7+ years, including 2+ years in a formal leadership role or as a co-founder) - Strong fundamentals: roadmapping, sprint planning, spec writing, prioritization frameworks - Sharp customer discovery instincts and the ability to identify high-impact opportunities fast - Comfortable managing multiple companies and stakeholders simultaneously - Ability to influence founders and executives without direct authority - For more senior candidates: a proven track record leading and developing other PMs, not just doing great PM work individually - Strong systems thinking — you see patterns across companies and know how to turn them into playbooks - High autonomy, low ego. You figure things out and get them done - Entrepreneurial mindset and genuine comfort with ambiguity **This Role Is Perfect for You If...** - You are an ex-founder, or have founding PM / early product hire experience at a high-growth startup - You want real ownership over how businesses (and, over time, entire industry verticals) get transformed through software and AI - You get satisfaction from shipping great product yourself — and, as you grow, from building capability in others - You are commercially-minded and curious about private equity, rollups, and how profitable businesses are built - You want to work somewhere that moves fast, and has the results to prove it **Our Values at Beacon Software** - Humility: We acknowledge that the path to getting to the right answer involves being wrong along the way. We have strong beliefs which are weakly held. We actively seek new ideas and believe we can learn from anyone at any time. - Honesty: We are truth seeking in our approach to business problems. Business is a repeat game and we believe that human relationships generate alpha. We understand that trust is earned over a lifetime and can be lost in an instant. - Hunger: We play to win. We hold ourselves to high standards and will not be outworked. We take pride in having a deep sense of responsibility to ourselves, each other, our partners, and our customers. We believe to whom much is given much is expected. - Horizon: We seek to build a generational software company. This will take decades. We manage our expectations and those of our partners to take advantage of the 8th wonder of the world - compounding growth. ***How We Use AI in Our Hiring Process:** To ensure transparency, we want candidates to know that Beacon Software uses Artificial Intelligence and AI-enabled tools to assist with screening, reviewing, organizing and highlighting profiles and applications that match the key requirements for each role.* ***AI does not make hiring decisions:** Every application is reviewed by a member of our team, and all decisions throughout the process are made by humans. We use AI to support efficiency and consistency, not to replace human judgment. We are committed to a fair, thoughtful, and equitable experience for every candidate.*