Changing the future — An open letter to you, Product Manager

The world is changing. Or maybe it has already changed. You’ve been sheltering in place with family, roommates, or on your own. Or you might have been caring for a loved one, and understood the meaning of the phrase, at-risk, all too well. There’s a very good chance that your company isn’t doing well right now, and an even bigger chance that you’ve come to the conclusion your company isn’t doing ‘good’ either.

With over 1.6 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 and nearly 100,000 deaths as of this writing in the US alone, it’s clear that the landscape is changing, and everyone must adapt along with it.

One of the biggest changes in the economy is the shift from in-person retailing to online retailing. Sure, there was a ton of e-commerce before the pandemic and it was growing quickly. However, that growth was a case of finding ways to encourage consumers to buy select goods online, while balancing profitability and growth against the costs of shipping in a reasonable time. Most online retail from before was what we now call “non-essential”, and company leaders thought mostly about how to be more discoverable to their customers. How to effectively ship fresh foods in a grocery context or automate warehouse logistics against possible labor shortages was a noble but ultimately non-urgent focus pre-pandemic.

Today, this has all changed. E-commerce has exploded far beyond expectations, with some experts describing the growth “as if we skipped 3–5 years into a normal-growth future,” with most of the change coming from “essential” goods like food. And all this growth isn’t coming after years of innovation and investment in logistics and automation, it’s coming all at once at a time when fewer and fewer people are available to ‘staff-up’ to meet the demand.

Throughout history, people have been the ultimate stop-gap for nearly every problem. We’re intelligent, mentally flexible, observant, trainable, and in many cases the only limit to our scale is an employer’s willingness to pay the marginal salary that would convince us to work for them. Fields were tilled by hand before the ox pulled a plow or farmer rode a tractor, and now automation controls crop choices, watering, dusting, planting cycles and the optimal harvest time. Cars were assembled by hand, then manually in specialized steps, and now oftentimes the majority of a new car is assembled by machines, with the help of a handful of people. Amazon, despite it’s heavy investment in warehouse and delivery automation, hired nearly 100,000 people over the course of the past few months to deal with the increase in demand.

We’re entering a phase in the history of our supply chain where not only do our rapidly-growing demands exceed a normal ability to staff up, but our ability to insert people as automation stop-gaps is being eroded due to the health risks of working in close proximity to one another. This, coupled with the fact that so much of the increased strain on the supply chain is driven by essential goods like food, makes for a painful period where society as a whole seems to be forced into uncomfortable tradeoffs.

Now, back to the personal situation at hand. Despite the need to hire more people than safe distancing would allow, there are also thousands of otherwise skilled and knowledge workers who are out of a job. You might even be one of them. That’s an incredibly uncomfortable position to be in after reading so many words describing a lack of capacity for production and distribution.

Here’s where the story turns.

OSARO is an Artificial Intelligence for Industrial Automation company tackling many of these problems head-on.

With so much of the world’s supply chain in need of automation instead of additional people, we enable flexible and autonomous automation in warehouse operations and factories. Our products do everything from loading and unloading of goods inside warehouses, to picking and packing the very same orders that are then sent out to those who are sheltering in place. We’re already deployed in critical facilities like grocery distribution centers that help ensure food and dry goods are available to those who need them.

We specialize in software — specifically computer vision and robotic control software — which, when paired with existing or available hardware like robotic arms, can be rapidly deployed into custom-built environments or as retro-fits for environments that are no longer safe for people.

We’re also growing — both as a company and as a solution that can address more and more of these newly-arising needs in the market. With increased demand by end-customers, all parts of the supply chain are investigating and investing in automation both to support immediate needs and to insure against future crunches like the one we’re seeing. That means our team is expanding to meet the increased demand for our existing and future products.

What does that mean?

It means we’re looking for someone like you. An experienced product manager to help us meet the challenges of our time.

Our ~50 person team has all the hallmarks of what success looks like on paper — 9 PhD’s on staff, multiple papers published, credentials from some of the best academic institutions in the world, with multiple specialists in all of our key interdisciplinary areas of focus. We’ve also got what it takes to succeed in the real world — senior leadership who have seen and done the growth stages before, top tier investors, and a focus on solving real customer pain points to drive product value. We’ve also got those intangibles that make everything else work better: diversity in thought and background, a willingness to debate the right course of action, and the cohesion to come together to focus when the target is in sight.

We’re looking for someone like you. Someone who brings not just a diversity of thought, but of experience, origin, nationality, and gender. Someone who has done this (B2B Software Product Management) before. Someone who understands, has experience with, and can handle the complexities of an embedded software product, dependent on cutting edge A.I. (machine learning, computer vision, deep learning, and deep reinforcement learning), as well as robot control (IK, motion planning), in a channel sales environment where we work side-by-side with our system integrator partners to enable end-customers to succeed.

You know how to jump into a discussion with technical leaders to elicit the key information about a situation that allows you to guide the right trade-offs. You can navigate the interpersonal, political and business pitfalls of having all the responsibility of the success of the product and company, but none of the authority to direct your engineering peers and counterparts to do anything in particular. You know how critical it is to spend time getting aligned with other departments like Sales, Marketing, and Engineering, but how risky it is to consume all their free time with meetings.

You know how to set yourself up for success both in the role of Product Manager (bringing clear customer research to the conversation, documenting clearly in narrative and acceptance criteria or story format, etc), as well as how to set yourself out from the crowd of applicants (with a cover letter that references your thoughts and reactions to this open letter).

Most of all, you know your skills could be put to better use than in building the next social app, influencer tool, or marketing automation platform. You want to help us unlock the next wave of automation and productivity in our global supply chain — to help with the pressures of today’s pandemic needs, but also to future-proof the world’s supply of critical goods against the next thing “we could never have seen coming”.

We want you to join us.