Director of Product

About Weaviate Weaviate is an AI startup with open source and creativity at its core. Our AI-native vector database uses machine learning to create meaningful insights from unstructured data in a completely new way. Named one of Forbes’ Top 50 AI startups, and with over a million monthly downloads, Weaviate is quickly growing in popularity with developers and enterprises alike. Our team members work remotely across the globe with the flexibility to work from anywhere and at any time. Our people experience this as a massive benefit! Operating with a strong sense of ownership and collaboration, our teams prioritize results while empowering each individual to do their best work. About this role Weaviate has been really successful in enterprise, and we're doubling down on that by growing our enterprise-facing teams. That shifts what the product has to do. Large customers arrive with specific requirements, and someone has to decide which of those we build, in what order, and which ones we tell the customer we won't build. As Director of Product, you'll own product strategy and decision-making across the Weaviate Database, Weaviate Cloud, and our agent products. You'll spend a lot of your week with customers, and the rest of it turning what you heard into a roadmap that engineering can act on. You'll work directly with our CTO on vision and with tech leads on what's actually feasible. This is a player-coach role. You'll manage a small product team, likely one to three PMs over time, while continuing to own product areas yourself. Who we're looking for You're comfortable in front of enterprise customers, and you go looking for those conversations rather than waiting for them to be scheduled. You can tell the difference between a request that will block a deal and a request that's a minor annoyance, and you can explain how you reached that conclusion. You make prioritization decisions using evidence. When you say one feature should ship before another, you can clearly explain the business impact and tradeoffs behind that decision, and you're comfortable defending it. You have a real working relationship with engineering. You understand that adding something to the plan means something else moves, and you're upfront about those tradeoffs. You take tech debt seriously when engineers make the case for it. You spend enough time with the teams that trust is already there when a hard conversation comes up. You're senior enough to hold your ground. Priorities will get pulled in different directions by big opportunities, and part of your job is deciding when that's the right call and when to push back. Responsibilities Translate Customer Reality into a Roadmap Run a continuous rhythm of customer conversations: discovery calls, renewals, and support signal Turn enterprise requirements into clear specs engineering can build from, with the underlying problem attached, so the team can make good calls without you in the room Maintain one prioritized roadmap that shows what's shipping, what got moved to make room, and why Own Prioritization and Business Value Attach an expected business impact to significant roadmap items so tradeoffs can be argued with evidence Assess incoming enterprise requests for criticality and pattern: is this one customer, or the first of many Manage expectations across sales, leadership, and customers when priorities change Define success metrics for major features and follow up on them after they ship Work Closely with Engineering Partner with tech leads on sequencing, feasibility, and dependency-heavy work across releases Make the cost of a change in direction explicit before it lands on a team Give engineering enough context on customer problems that they can push back with better ideas Keep the balance between customer-driven work and the reliability and platform work engineering needs to do Set the Operating Standard for Product Establish the operating cadence for planning and execution, with conventions engineering t