Founding Product Manager (m/f/d)

About the Job

As a key growth accelerator, A11 partners with Europe’s most ambitious startups and scaleups, corporates and SMBs to connect them with top-tier talent ready to make an impact.

We're looking for a motivated Founding Product Manager (m/f/d) to join and build the product function at one of our Ecosystem companies.

As a Founding Product Manager, you'll be the first product manager and work side by side with the founders to help decide what we build, for whom, and why; your decisions shape the product from your first week. Public procurement still runs on fragmented portals and PDFs nobody reads in time. We're live with customers, we talk to them constantly, and every conversation shows us where the product needs to go.

You'll make sure we learn faster than anyone else in this market and turn that into the product our customers use to win public contracts, learning the product by owning real decisions, seeing what they do in real usage, and working next to the founders who have shaped this product from day one.

Join the A11 Ecosystem

• a next-generation procurement platform redefining how businesses discover, evaluate, and win public tenders across one of the world's largest yet most fragmented markets: €2 trillion in annual contract volume, scattered across 4,500+ portals in 29 countries. It harnesses qualified AI matching and agentic workflow automation to surface only the tenders that fit, analyze 100+ page documents in 30 seconds, and draft winning bids in minutes. Backed by leading investors, the company is scaling fast toward becoming the category-defining player in European public procurement.

In this role, you’ll:

• Talk to customers every week and run your own product sessions, digging into how bid teams actually work, from the first tender alert to the final submission
• Turn insights into bets: form hypotheses, design experiments, define what success looks like, and let the data decide
• Own the roadmap and defend it with evidence
• Work side by side with engineering: shape the solution, write the specs, and get it shipped

After release, watch what customers actually do, talk to them again, and decide what to double down on Build the system that captures every customer signal, from interviews to sales calls to support requests

Bring the founders your sharpest insights: which problems keep coming up, which segments respond, and where we should go next

Typical tasks (first 90 days):

• Become the team's go-to person for what our customers need
• Own the roadmap, with every item tracing back to what customers told us
• Get your first experiments live, with at least one idea killed on data before anyone wrote a line of code
• Help the team run twice as many customer conversations, with nothing learned getting lost
• Run product day-to-day so the founders can focus on scaling the company

Your Profile:

Must haves:

• 1+ year of hands-on product experience, ideally in B2B SaaS. Strong internships, side projects, or your own startup count too
• You've shipped something real, at work or on your own, and can show what changed because of it
• You run customer interviews yourself and turn what you hear into clear decisions
• You test assumptions with qualitative and quantitative data instead of guessing
• You write specs engineers can build from and understand enough tech to discuss trade-offs
• Fluent German and English

Nice-to-haves:

• Experience with AI products, including judging output quality, not just shipping features
• A background in UX research or design
• Domain experience in procurement, bid management, or other document-heavy B2B workflows
• You've set up product analytics and know which events matter
• Comfortable building AI-native workflows with tools like Claude Code, n8n, or comparable, to make research and synthesis compound

You might be a fit if you:

• Want to learn product from founders, not from a playbook
• Would rather test an idea with five customers than debate it in a meeting
• Get a kick out of seeing customers use something you pushed for Are comfortable saying no to a feature request when the evidence isn't there
• Are hungry for ownership and not interested in waiting for permission
• Have something outside of work that shows you don't do things halfway, whether that's competitive sports, a side project, or something completely different
• See this as the path to becoming Head of Product in a company that plans to scale fast
• Want to apply anyway and show us what you have built

Please note that this position is based in Hamburg (on-site).

Our Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion

A11 is committed to diverse and equal opportunities hiring for all – applicants, candidates, and employees alike. We value humans – with all our glorious multifaceted backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences – and look forward to your application.