Director of Product

Exthymic is an early-stage deep-tech startup on a mission to prevent millions of cancer deaths by making curative cell therapies widely accessible. Our platform enables patient-specific treatment manufacturing at the point of care, overcoming the limits of centralized biopharma models. Led by experienced industry pioneers, we blend hardware, software, and biological engineering to disrupt the status quo and democratize life-saving therapies. Join us to solve complex challenges and drive global healthcare innovation.

About You:

You have deep experience standing up and operating a product function. You've worked in and across the cell and gene therapy ecosystem, you know how cell therapies are made and where manufacturing breaks down, and you understand how to bring a complex device, drug, or combination product to market. You've navigated regulatory uncertainty, learned new scientific concepts, and developed a product strategy that spans diverse customer types and timelines.

You get up to speed on a new product and its users fast, and you establish the development processes that bring it to market.

You visit labs and clinical sites, build relationships, and see how people work today. You translate what you learn into market and customer needs and product requirements, test them with a range of potential customers, and keep them up to date as development progresses.

You are the guiding voice in product direction. You'll work directly with our leadership team and with our engineering and science leads. When we debate direction, you make the case for the customer, backed by data.

This role may start without direct reports. You'll do the work yourself at first and build a team as the product function grows. You'd rather build than inherit a product organization.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

• Shape the product direction. Recommend where the product should go for the current platform and what comes after it, and back it with data. Push back when the market doesn't support a direction we like. Keep the direction current as science, engineering, the market, and the regulatory landscape change.
• Own the product roadmap. Keep the roadmap and the timeline to our major product milestones. Set priorities, and trade off scope, schedule, and customer needs.
• Know our customers and the market. Decide which customers we serve first and what they need from us. Spend time with the clinicians, scientists, and health system leaders who would use, buy, and approve a cell processing platform. Learn how they work, what the product has to fit into, and what would get them to adopt it. Know the competitive, technology, and regulatory landscape, and tell us what it means for our product.
• Own the product requirements. Write the customer needs, user stories, and product requirements. Test them with users and buyers, and revise them as you learn.
• Keep requirements and design aligned. Work with systems engineering, who maintain the requirements and verify the build against them, to keep requirements current as the science and design evolve. Agree with engineering, biology, regulatory, and quality on how customer needs become design inputs, and make sure every requirement traces back to a customer need.
• Own the product development process. Run our product development process and keep making it better: how requirements mature, how releases are scoped and reviewed, and how decisions get made and documented.
• Build the product function. Start as a hands-on individual contributor. Represent the product to our clinical collaborators and partners. As the function grows, hire and lead a product team.

Requirements

• 7 or more years in product roles, including building or running a product function or owning product direction, with a track record of taking products through development to market and setting up the development process behind them.
• Experience across more than one product type in related fields, for example, moving between instruments, diagnostics, devices, or lab automation.
• Experience with a regulated hardware or hardware-plus-software product, such as a medical device, diagnostic, or clinical laboratory instrument. You've worked inside design controls and a quality system.
• Experience shaping product direction and owning a roadmap: setting priorities, trading off scope, schedule, and customer needs, and making the case to executives with data.
• A track record of customer discovery and market analysis with technical or clinical users: deciding which customers to focus on, understanding the competitive landscape, and turning what you learn into product requirements and direction.
• Experience owning product requirements through development: defining them from customer needs, testing them with customers, and keeping them current alongside a systems engineering team.
• Comfortable making decisions on incomplete information in a market that is still forming and changing them when better information arrives.
• Demonstrated experience making tradeoffs in technical detail with engineers and scientists on products that combine mechanical, fluidic, software, and biological systems.
• Bachelor's or advanced degree in an engineering or scientific discipline, or equivalent industry experience.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Experience in cell and gene therapy or cell therapy manufacturing. Adjacent experience also counts: bioprocessing, cell culture automation, point-of-care diagnostics, or another field where the buyer is a clinical or research institution.
• Experience with a first-of-its-kind product, where the market had to be defined along with the product.
• Direct experience with academic medical centers, hospital laboratories, or health systems.
• Experience shaping regulatory strategy with regulatory and quality teams for a device, diagnostic, or combination product, including the move from research into design controls.
• Experience setting up product practice (requirements, roadmap, development process, or discovery) from nothing in an early-stage company.
• Experience hiring and leading product managers.
• You use AI tools in your work and have a good sense of where they help.