Principal Product Lead

Principal Product Leads own product strategy and delivery for our hardest 0-to-1 platform engagements. The work is high-ambiguity, technically cross-cutting, and politically loaded on the client side.

This is not a senior delivery PM role. Backlog management, ceremony facilitation, and status reporting are the floor, not the bar. We are hiring for judgment, taste, and intellectual force: the ability to identify the part of a messy enterprise problem that is actually hard, and drive the team toward a defensible answer. The Principal Product Lead is expected to raise the technical and strategic ceiling of any room they're in, including rooms with our own architects and the client's senior leadership.

You report to the VP of Agentic Product & Platform Strategy, sit in the Platform Delivery Studio, and run at a 90% billable target.

Why Rangle#

Rangle is making a deliberate bet: 12 years of lean, agile, and CX practice applied to agentic systems, and a wager that agentic is a platform engineering problem, not a project engineering problem. We're building toward sovereign, antifragile infrastructure that clients can actually own (Paddington.io), so they aren't permanently dependent on someone else's agent platform.

The thesis is that successful agentic systems are as much about culture, experience, and trust as they are about expertise and capability, and we want product leaders who find that bet interesting and want to help us prove it on real client work. Nobody has this fully figured out yet, including us. The product leaders we want are people who'll learn alongside the team, add to the lessons we've earned so far, and help us turn the next round of hard-won experience into something the next engagement gets to start from.

What We're Looking For#

• Problem-shaped thinking. You describe past work by the hard parts (the schema conflict, the regulatory constraint that broke the obvious design, the integration that looked simple and wasn't), not by phases and deliverables
• Specificity and ownership. You can name the trade-offs you made and why. You hold a view on technical choices adjacent to your work, even when provisional, and you stay close to decisions that shape your roadmap
• Empirical definitions of success. You can answer "how did you know it was working" with something concrete: a leading indicator, a falsifiable hypothesis, a behaviour that shifted, an outcome metric tied to a real decision
• Insight pulled across context. If you've worked across industries, you can name the thread that generalised and what didn't. The synthesis is the credential
• An internal engine. Curiosity that goes past the work surface. You read, build, and form genuine opinions about tools and methods
• Ceiling-raising. When you join a conversation with senior stakeholders or our architects, the technical and strategic ceiling of that conversation goes up. You ask the question that reframes the problem or take a position the room hadn't considered

Major Responsibilities#

• Discovery. Lead continuous discovery: story mapping, stakeholder interviews, assumption testing. Surface the hard problems early, while there is still room to shape the response
• Delivery governance. Own flow metrics, RAID, and executive reporting. Establish governance clarity within four weeks. Communicate progress and risk plainly, including when the news is hard
• Stakeholder management. Primary product voice to client up to C-suite. Build the kind of trust that lets you tell sponsors what they need to hear, and have it land
• Team coordination. Partner with Solution Architects on sequencing. On scaled programs, coordinate across delivery teams and mentor a more junior PM toward your standard
• Agentic and platform strategy. Drive client alignment on agentic tooling permissions, evaluation regimes, and human-in-the-loop levels. Bring a clear, defensible point of view
• Business development. Sharpen proposals and scoping with delivery insight

Skills and Experience#

• 10+ years in product, with at least 3 years in platform, infrastructure, or genuine 0-to-1 work where the shape of the product was still being figured out
• Direct experience with enterprise clients in regulated or organisationally complex environments. You can describe a specific moment where a constraint forced a non-obvious product call
• Strong working knowledge of front-end architecture, API orchestration, data integration patterns, and cloud-native concepts. You don't write code, but you can engage substantively with architects and offer a real point of view when you disagree
• Continuous discovery practiced in parallel with delivery. The portfolio evidence we want includes a hypothesis you killed, not just features you shipped
• Familiarity with agentic AI tooling, LLM-assisted development workflows, and AI governance considerations. This is a working knowledge requirement, grounded in hands-on use rather than personal-task curiosity
• Consulting or significant client-facing delivery experience. Builds executive trust quickly while holding your own line
• Clear written and verbal communication. You write in your own voice rather than reaching for stock product-management phrasing, and you describe work in terms specific enough that a reader can tell which engagement you mean

How We'll Evaluate You#

• A technical depth probe on a past engagement. You pick the engagement; we pick the layer to dig into
• A live exercise structuring an ambiguous brief. We are evaluating decomposition, what you ask first, and what you defer
• A conversation about a tool or method you've changed your mind about, and why
• References focused on whether you raised the ceiling of the rooms you were in

Working Relationships#

Internal: VP of Agentic Product & Platform Strategy, Managing Director, Solution Architects, Developers, Product Designers, Director of AI Strategy, CEO/CDO

External: Client product owners, engineering leads, design leads, and executive sponsors up to C-suite