Senior Product Owner (m/w/d)

You'll have responsibility to coordinate and align the product roadmap, manage prioritization, and discovery of our product. Your job is to be the voice of the planner, scheduler, management and supply chain manager from our customers inside our company — and to turn deep user understanding into a product that scales.

This is a hands-on role in a growing team. You'll build internal tools and processes as you go, working directly with our developers, implementation team, customers, and founders.

You will manage the inbound sales insights, requests from customers, project requirements and ideas from the team into one pipeline. Prioritization logic must be driven by business case and clear strategic alignment.

What You'll Do

• Maintain product roadmap and executing prioritization decisions in close collaboration with our founders and developers
• Spend real time with users — production planners, schedulers, plant and supply chain managers — to understand their daily workflows, pain points, and decision-making
• Translate user needs into clear use cases, product flows, and requirements that engineers can build from
• Design for trust: shape how our optimization results and automated decisions are explained to the user, how users override and interact with automated decisions, and how we earn the confidence of skeptical operational users
• Build developer enablement by creating user personas, user journeys and more.
• Turn one-off customer requests into generalizable product capabilities
• Work closely with implementation teams to feed real deployment learnings back into the product
• Define and track adoption and value metrics that go beyond "features shipped"
• Build the product management foundation (discovery practices, prioritization, release planning) for future hires

Requirements

Must-haves

• 5+ years of professional experience, with significant experience in product roles
• Deep familiarity with industrial users and workflows — from working in or building products for manufacturing, supply chain, logistics, or process industries (e.g., APS, SCM, MES, industrial IoT, or vertical manufacturing SaaS)
• Experience with decision-support, automation, or optimization products — you've thought hard about explainability, human-in-the-loop design, and user trust in system recommendations in AI or optimization systems
• Enough technical fluency to discuss constraints, objectives, and trade-offs with engineers working on optimization and AI (you don't need to be an OR expert)
• You are comfortable to build processes and structures as we go and as we need them (not earlier)
• Strong stakeholder skills with enterprise customers — comfortable pushing back on custom requests and mediating between engineering, implementation, and sales
• Fluent English for international customers and internal work
• Fluent German (C2 or native) for german customers
• Willingness to travel occasionally to meet in person with users

Nice-to-haves

• A background as a production planner, industrial engineer, or supply chain practitioner before moving into product
• Experience in companies where implementation/professional services are part of the delivery model
• Exposure to the APS/SCM software landscape (e.g., SAP, Blue Yonder, Siemens Opcenter, or their challengers)
• Basic UX skills — you can sketch flows and wireframes to communicate ideas

Benefits

At akeno, we believe people do their best work when they feel supported, connected, and empowered. Here's what you can look forward to:

• Generous Annual Compensation
• 35-40 Hours Working Week – Supporting work-life balance without compromising impact
• Real Ownership - You define the product functions from day one and shape a category-defining product
• Relocation Package – Full support, including relocation assistance and accommodation guidance
• Visa Sponsorship – Comprehensive support throughout the process
• Wellpass Gym Membership – Access to hundreds of fitness and wellness options for just €10/month
• Job Ticket – Subsidized public transport to keep your commute affordable and stress-free
• German Language Courses – Learn or improve your German with our supported language program
• Snacks, Drinks & Great Coffee – Always available to keep you fuelled and focused
• Modern Office with a View – Work from our beautiful Hamburg office with panoramic city views
• Supportive & International Team – Join a warm, open-minded group of colleagues from around the world
• Real Ownership – You'll have space to take initiative and make a tangible impact
• Flexible Working Hours – Because we understand that life and studies don’t always fit a 9–5
• Regular Team Events – From lunches to offsites—we celebrate the wins (big and small) together