Lead Product Manager

Lead Product Manager

Location: Flexible (Europe/UK); proximity to a major life-sciences hub preferred

Travel: ~20–30% with peaks during discovery workshops, pilots, and conference seasons

About Us

ZONTAL provides the premier data platform tailored for the life science industry. Our platform is at the forefront of digital transformation, delivering solutions that address the complex, data-heavy reality of modern R&D, QC, and manufacturing. We streamline IT landscapes, enable AI/ML applications on top of FAIR, well-governed data, accelerate product time-to-market, and strengthen regulatory compliance for global enterprises.

With teams and customers across the US, Europe, and Asia, ZONTAL supports leading pharma and biotech organizations through a global network of integration and service partners, ensuring follow-the-sun coverage and consistent delivery quality.

Job Summary

We are seeking an experienced Lead Product Manager to own the vision, roadmap, and execution for key components of the ZONTAL platform. This person will sit at the intersection of lab science, data standards, and modern cloud architecture—translating customer workflows into scalable products that are AI-ready by design.

You should be equally comfortable in a lab discussing chromatography workflows, in a whiteboard session mapping Allotrope Foundation ontologies and knowledge graphs, and in technical reviews with engineers on APIs, data models, and deployment patterns. This role will partner closely with customers, engineering, product marketing, and our SciY ecosystem to deliver end-to-end value across connectivity, data management, and orchestration.

Key Responsibilities

Product Strategy & Vision

• Translate the Product’s overall strategy into a clear product vision and multi-year roadmap for one or more core product pillars (e.g., Data Connectivity, Data Management, Data Orchestration).
• Propose and champion strategic product bets within your pillar, backed by customer insight, data, and commercial impact.
• Ensure your roadmap aligns with company goals, cross-product dependencies, and platform strategy.

Customer & Domain Discovery

• Engage deeply with scientists, lab managers, data/IT, and QA/QC stakeholders to understand real-world workflows across R&D, QC, and manufacturing.
• Run structured discovery (interviews, ride-alongs, lab visits, pilots) to understand sample lifecycles, assay design, automation constraints, and regulatory requirements.

Technical Product Ownership

• Own product requirements from problem statement through detailed specifications: user stories, data models, and non-functional requirements.
• Collaborate with engineering and architecture to make trade-offs on performance, scalability, and extensibility in a modular microservices-based environment.
• Ensure products and features are designed to be AI-ready, with well-structured, contextualized data and clear integration points for analytics and ML.

Standards, Data Models & Ontologies

• Champion the use of industry standards, such as Allotrope Simple Model (ASM), and related standards to create interoperable, open systems.
• Work with internal and external SMEs to design and evolve semantic models, controlled vocabularies, and mappings between lab systems and the ZONTAL data backbone.
• Ensure alignment with FAIR principles, ALCOA+, 21 CFR Part 11, GxP, and enterprise data governance needs.

Roadmap & Prioritization

• Drive backlog refinement and prioritization using a clear framework (e.g., impact, risk, effort, strategic fit) and transparent trade-offs.
• Balance net-new innovation with platform hardening, scale, and lifecycle management.

Delivery & Lifecycle Management

• Lead cross-functional squads through discovery, design, build, release, and post-launch optimization using Agile practices.
• Define release scope, acceptance criteria, and quality bars in collaboration with engineering, QA, and regulatory/validation stakeholders.
• Monitor product performance and adoption, iterating based on real usage, feedback, and telemetry.

Go-to-Market & Field Alignment

• Partner with Product Marketing to define positioning, packaging, and pricing for your product areas.
• Enable Sales, Services, and Partners with product narratives, solution diagrams, and configuration guidance for reference architectures and use cases

Qualifications

• 7–10+ years of B2B SaaS product management experience, ideally in life sciences, scientific software, industrial automation, or data platforms.
• Strong technical foundation: degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Bioinformatics, Chemistry, or related field, or equivalent experience as a technical PM.
• Hands-on experience with lab informatics (e.g., ELN, LIMS, SDMS, CDS, LES, MES) and/or lab automation (e.g. OPC UA, SiLA2).
• Demonstrated ability to work with data standards and ontologies, including Allotrope Foundation models, FAIR data frameworks, and knowledge graph concepts.
• Proven track record of delivering complex, multi-stakeholder products from discovery through launch and iteration.
• Comfortable reading and discussing API designs, data schemas, and cloud-native architectures (e.g., microservices, event streams, containerization).
• Experience building products in or adjacent to regulated environments (GxP, 21 CFR Part 11, GDPR, data integrity).
• Excellent communication and storytelling skills; able to translate between scientists, engineers, and executives.
• Experience working with distributed, cross-functional teams across time zones.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience as a bench scientist, lab manager, or automation engineer in pharma/biotech, CRO/CDMO, or diagnostics.
• Prior ownership of products enabling lab digitalization, digital methods/SOPs, or lab orchestration.
• Direct experience with Allotrope