Founding Product Manager - Berlin

Founding Product Manager - Berlin @ Root Global

Location

Berlin

Employment Type

Full time

Location Type

On-site

Department

Product & Design

🌎 What we do

We build software to enable sustainable agriculture supply chains.

~31% of global GHG emissions originate from food-related activities. For the first time in history, climate performance has become an overall business performance indicator. Enterprises are mandated by regulatory bodies to disclose their climate performance, which leads to increasing pressure from investors, competitors, retailers, and consumers to prevent and reduce their CO2e emissions. Over the next 10 years, companies have set ambitious reduction targets that need to be met. Enterprise software and new business processes can help - to make processes in the day-to-day more efficient, connect farmers better to their partners and thus, enable action in supply chains.

We raised >€10m in funding in the first 2 years of our existence, we launched our enterprise product, signed and onboarded some of the largest F&B players in Europe, and put together what we believe is the best-suited early stage tech team in Europe.

Today Root is the #1 primary data collection platform for dairy in DACH. We are AI-enabled at the core and driving the AI transformation across the food and agri world. The next chapter is bigger.

🔭 What you will work on

Your mission

Build an innovative operating system for the dairy industry from 0 to 1, at the intersection of farmers and dairies. Dairy is Root's home market. We know it inside out - the players, the workflows, the technology gaps, the people. We see a category-defining opportunity to build a new product line that sits between farmers and dairy processors, and that has the potential to become the connecting piece of our portfolio.

This is a genuinely greenfield role. You will not inherit a backlog. You will define what we build, why, and for whom - then prove it works with a handful of pilot customers before we scale.

What your job will look like:

• Run deep discovery. Spend weeks with farmers, farm technicians, milk procurement teams, and dairy executives on-site. Understand their jobs, KPIs, and frustrations from the inside.
• Define new workflows together with our customers. Shape how dairy companies will work in the future. This product line is about setting a new standard, not digitising what already exists - while AI will be at the core of it.
• Build hacky prototypes and run pilots. Show, do not tell. Get something tangible in front of 2-3 design partners within weeks.
• Assess desirability, feasibility, and viability before we commit serious engineering investment.
• Define the v1 spec with engineering and design once we have conviction. Set the team up for delivery.
• Onboard the first paying customers and iterate fast. Own the loop.
• Decide what we will NOT build. Scope discipline is critical with limited engineering capacity and a customer base that operates on a fixed annual cycle.

You will work side by side with the Head of Product to make the bet, and own the product line end-to-end as it grows. Engineering and design support will scale with traction.

What success looks like at 6 months:

• A first end-to-end prototype tested with real customers
• 3 signed Letters of Intent from new customers
• A concrete, evidence-backed set of build hypotheses for v1

🦾 How we support you

You will report directly to our Head of Product.

Some of our angel investors that will actively mentor you:

• Mengting Bönsch (Founder & ex-CEO @Kitchenstories) - 0 to 1 product in food
• Alexander Argyros (Founder @BlueLayer, ex-founder @Moonfare) - founder craft and early-stage discovery
• Jan Philipp Thomsen (VP Product @Celonis) - scaling enterprise B2B SaaS
• Vassili Samolis (Director Product @Doordash, ex-Instagram, ex-Pinterest) - product discovery at scale

It is important to us to give you the best conditions for learning and career growth. This is why we have designed our cap table in a way that all our early employees get functional experts as mentors by your side.

🧺 What you bring along

Language requirement: Fluent in German and English. Non-negotiable - our customers and most farmers are German-speaking.

Location: Berlin office, 5 days a week.

You might be a good fit if:

• You have 5-7 years of B2B SaaS product management experience, ideally including a stint at an early-stage startup before product-market fit.
• You have built a product line or a major module from 0 to 1 - not just iterated on an existing one. You can talk us through what worked, what did not, and what you learned.
• You love discovery. Customer interviews, field research, prototyping, and pilots are your favourite part of the job, not the part you outsource.
• You love observing how others do their job. You take the parts that matter, design new workflows around them, and put prototypes in front of users to iterate - rather than running survey-driven roadmaps.
• You are AI-fluent. Modern AI tools are part of your daily craft - for discovery synthesis, prototyping, writing, coding. You also have a point of view on how AI reshapes the products we build.
• You have an interest or background in food, agriculture, or sustainability. Preferred, not required. We will teach you the domain.

🤗 You don't feel like you fulfill all the criteria? We get it: confidence can sometimes hold us back from applying for a job. But guess what?! There is no such thing as a “perfect” candidate. The only thing you need to ensure along the recruiting process and beyond is that the problem that we are solving with Root is one you cannot wait to get out of bed for on Monday morning!

🎢 Hiring Process

Our ambition is to offer you an end-to-end experience that is fast and uncomplicated - we aim to keep the end-to-end process to 10 working days. We send you prep material for each step and maximise transparency at every step.

Root Global is an equal opportunity employer, which means we do not discriminate on the basis of race, colour, religion, marital status, age, national origin, ancestry, physical or mental disability, medical condition, pregnancy, genetic information, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.