<p><strong>Director of Product</strong></p><p><strong>HydroJug, Inc. — Product Team</strong></p><p>Ogden, UT | On-Site | Reports to the Chief Executive Officer</p><p><br></p><p><strong>About the Role</strong></p><p>The Director of Product owns HydroJug's new product development engine end to end — from opportunity identification through tooling, validation, and launch. This role sets the product roadmap for net-new physical products, runs the five-stage development process that moves them from concept to shelf, and builds the business cases that determine which products get funded and which do not.</p><p><strong>This is an innovation seat, not a line-extension seat.</strong> HydroJug competes in a category where the winning product visibly does something the alternative does not. We are looking for someone whose portfolio is a series of genuinely differentiated products — premium materials, a feature you can demonstrate in five seconds, brought to market before the competition could answer it — rather than one successful product and the variants that followed it.</p><p>This is also a hands-on leadership seat rather than a governance seat. The Director of Product manages the industrial design team, chairs the day-to-day development process, and is accountable for the commercial outcome of the products that ship. The role exists to give a single owner to a function the company has run through its executive team to date.</p><p><br></p><p><strong>Responsibilities</strong></p><ul><li><strong>Product Roadmap & Portfolio Strategy</strong> — Own the multi-year roadmap for net-new products. Decide what enters development, in what sequence, and against what commercial thesis. Maintain a live view of the portfolio's category coverage, margin profile, and cannibalization risk.</li><li><strong>Opportunity Identification</strong> — Build a continuous pipeline of product opportunities from consumer insight, category and competitive analysis, retailer feedback, and channel performance data. Convert that signal into defined product concepts with a stated consumer problem and a stated commercial case. This is a core accountability of the role, not a support activity — nobody hands this role a brief.</li><li><strong>Differentiation & Feature Innovation</strong> — Define what each product does that competing products do not, and make that claim provable. Own the functional thesis behind every program, the materials and finishes that support a premium position, and the intellectual property strategy that protects it. Repeatedly, across product families, not once.</li><li><strong>Business Cases & Trade-Off Analysis</strong> — Author the business case for every product entering development: volume and revenue forecast, landed cost and margin targets, tooling investment and payback, channel fit, and risk. Present explicit trade-off analysis — cost versus feature, speed versus certainty, tooling investment versus flexibility — and make a recommendation rather than presenting options.</li><li><strong>Stage-Gate Ownership</strong> — Run the five-stage new product development process end to end, holding every product to its gate criteria on design brief, concept selection, design for manufacture and value engineering, tooling and first-article sampling, and launch readiness. Prepare and defend gate submissions for executive sign-off.</li><li><strong>Development Execution</strong> — Drive products through CAD and tech pack development, prototyping and 3D-print validation, design for manufacture review with suppliers, value engineering to margin targets, tooling release, golden sample approval, and field testing.</li><li><strong>Materials & Finish Strategy</strong> — Select and specify the materials, coatings, and finishes that carry a premium product: insulation systems, metals and surface treatments, food-contact polymers and silicones, sealing and gasket systems, glass and ceramic. Own the cost, tooling, and quality consequences of those choices.</li><li><strong>Team Leadership</strong> — Manage and develop the industrial design team: set the design quality bar, allocate designer capacity across the portfolio, approve tech packs and callout sheets, and grow the technical depth of the group.</li><li><strong>Cross-Functional Delivery</strong> — Partner with Sourcing, Supply Chain, Quality, Finance, Legal, Marketing, and the sales channels to clear the dependencies a product needs to launch. Hold standing service-level agreements with those functions and escalate breaches rather than absorbing them.</li><li><strong>Intellectual Property & Compliance</strong> — Coordinate patent, trademark, and design-right strategy with counsel, with an emphasis on utility protection for genuine mechanisms, and ensure regulatory and safety clearance is complete before tooling release.</li><li><strong>Speed-to-Market Lane</strong> — Maintain an expedited development path for fast-turn product programs, collaborations, and finish-level customizations that ship outside the standard development calendar without dropping below the quality standard.</li><li><strong>Supplier & Factory Partnership</strong> — Own the technical relationship with overseas manufacturing partners, including factory selection input, sampling cadence, and on-site development trips as required.</li></ul><p><br></p><p><strong>Qualifications</strong></p><p><strong>Required</strong></p><ul><li>8+ years in product development, product management, or category leadership for physical consumer products, with at least 3 years leading a team or owning a category</li><li><strong>A portfolio of multiple distinct, differentiated products across more than one product family</strong> — not one successful product and its line extensions. You should be able to name, for each, what the product did that competing products could not</li><li>Demonstrated ownership of consumer hard goods from concept through mass production — products that shipped and sold, not concepts that stalled</li><li><strong>Commercial ownership, not only technical execution.</strong> You have carried a category or P&L number, decided what to fund and what to kill, and lived with the sell-through result. A purely technical or engineering career history is not a fit for this seat</li><li>Working fluency in the mechanics of physical product development — CAD and tech packs, tolerances and materials, design for manufacture, value engineering, tooling types and timelines, first-article and golden sample approval. You can still read a drawing and evaluate a designer's work</li><li>Proven ability to build and defend a product business case: volume and revenue forecasting, landed cost and margin modeling, tooling investment and payback analysis, and written trade-off analysis</li><li>Direct experience running a formal stage-gate development process, including authoring gate submissions and enforcing gate criteria under schedule pressure</li><li><strong>Premium materials and finish fluency</strong> — you can explain why a material, coating, or sealing system was chosen, what it cost, and what it did to the tooling</li><li>Experience managing overseas manufacturing partners directly, including factory selection, sampling cycles, and technical specification handoff. Not through a sourcing agent</li><li>Experience hiring, managing, and developing designers or product developers</li><li>Track record of moving quickly — you have compressed the distance between an insight and a proven product on shelf, and can speak to what was traded away to do it</li></ul><p><strong>Preferred</strong></p><ul><li>Background at a consumer products company known for repeated feature innovation in premium hard goods, where product development is the competitive strategy rather than a support function</li><li>Named inventor on utility patents for consumer products</li><li>Experience with drinkware, housewares, premium outdoor, small appliance, or consumer device categories</li><li>Exposure to both direct-to-consumer and national retail channels, including retailer-exclusive product programs</li><li>Grew into product leadership from a technical or design foundation rather than a purely commercial one</li></ul><p><br></p><p><strong>Reporting & Organization</strong></p><p>The Director of Product reports to the Chief Executive Officer and sits on the Product team.</p><p>The role manages the industrial design group — a Senior Industrial Designer / Design Lead and two Industrial Designers — with three direct reports at hire and the expectation of growing the function as product volume scales.</p><p>The Director of Product partners closely with a dedicated Product Manager for new product development, who is matrixed onto the Product team from Operations and owns the day-to-day process cadence, the project tracking system, and cross-functional coordination.</p><p>The role presents at the Product Board, a standing cross-functional forum comprising the CEO and senior leaders from ecommerce, sales, marketing, brand, and customer experience, which provides gate feedback across the product portfolio. Final sign-off authority on design brief, tooling release, and launch readiness gates is retained by the CEO.</p><p>This role is based on-site in Ogden, Utah. Relocation support is available.</p><p><br></p><p><strong>Compensation & Benefits</strong></p><p>This is a base-salary role. HydroJug pays market for the function and the experience of the person. Director-level seats at HydroJug are not bonus-eligible, and HydroJug does not offer equity — the base salary is the whole offer, and the number you see is the number.</p><p>Benefits include a 401(k) with a QACA safe harbor match to a maximum of 3.5% of pay at a 6% employee contribution, fully vested after two years; employer-subsidized medical premiums at the Manager tier; and 20 days of paid time off plus 12 paid holidays.</p><p>Relocation support is available and is handled separately from base salary.</p><p><br></p><p><strong>About HydroJug, Inc.</strong></p><p>HydroJug, Inc. is a consumer brand headquartered in Ogden, Utah, designing and selling premium hydration and lifestyle products through direct-to-consumer and major retail channels.</p>