Commercial Product Director

The organisation

Whitespace Solutions blends gaming principles with bespoke algorithms, self-learning AI, and highly tailored user interfaces, to help domain experts and senior leaders make radically better decisions. Game AI mimics the human ability to learn from experience and has become famous for achieving top performance in games such as chess and poker. Whitespace Solutions believes, and shows, that Game AI can also add significant business value and truly transform ways of working – while humans remain in control.

Whitespace Solutions, founded by two former Shell employees, operates globally with a very international team. The company has originally been mainly active in oil & gas, leveraging its solutions for well and field planning. Increasingly, the company also works for clients in logistics, renewable energy, and healthcare. Their mission is to radically improve decision-making in organizations, from daily operations to long-term planning and strategy. Ultimately, any business where (capacity) planning, workflow efficiency, or insight generation is of strategic importance is a potential client for Whitespace Solutions. With the company’s support, clients can reduce their operating costs, improve their asset management, optimize staff efficiency, and reduce fuel usage – to name a few of the results Whitespace Solutions can achieve.

Whitespace Solutions is now building a product line for resource planning: maintenance and logistics. This is a logical next step, that fits well with the company’s expertise and with the needs of its current customers. But it has potential applications in other areas as well. The Commercial Product Director will explore and concretize these, allowing Whitespace Solutions to market new propositions and enter new industries.

The position

Whitespace Solutions started as a boutique consulting firm in the traditional sense and quickly discovered the power of AI for solution delivery. The company now focuses on AI-driven business solutions: mainly for the energy sector and expanding into logistics, healthcare and more. The Commercial Product Director builds propositions in maintenance planning and logistics, allowing Whitespace Solutions to branch out further into new industries.

Tasks & responsibilities

The Commercial Product Director will build and sustain a new business line of AI-assisted planning solutions and drive business development around these, with a special focus on applications around maintenance and logistics planning use cases. They will be end-to-end responsible for product and business development, pricing strategy, contracting, project delivery, and customer support. The Commercial Product Director is part of the management team and reports to the company’s founders and managing partners. They will lead dedicated teams of product developers.

Performing market research and segmentation is a crucial part of this role, thus identifying potential customer groups for whom resource planning technology can add value. The Commercial Product Director will also generate specific propositions for each of these, leveraging scalable backend technology into tailored, industry-specific applications. They also lead product positioning, devise a go-to-market strategy, and are in charge of marketing. In addition, they will lead project delivery.

Management responsibilities

The Commercial Product Director shows strong leadership and stakeholder management skills. On the technical side, they will communicate and translate customer needs to the technical team, monitor progress against the roadmap, and keep the development teams accountable while enabling them to deliver, through clear communication. On the commercial side, they will lead commercial negotiations and contracting discussions.

They also manage the product line’s KPIs: maintaining its resource plan, tracking and managing its financial goals and performance, improving its existing roadmap based on market insights, and creating and managing its long-term development roadmap.

“At Whitespace Solutions, what makes us special is that we focus on delivery and pushing boundaries, while deeply believing that trust is more important than protocol. And that frequent, candid feedback is the key to personal and professional success.” – Tom Savels, Founder and Managing Director

Candidate profile

In this role, a versatile and analytically strong product director, product marketeer, or business developer with technology and strategy experience will have the opportunity to establish an entirely new product line and serve several new customer groups – ideally, bringing in a network with potential new customers from the get-go. In doing so, they will contribute significantly to Whitespace Solutions’ mission: radically improving decision-making in organizations, from daily operations to long-term planning and strategy.

Requirements*

• Over 10 years of experience
• In product management
• Or in business development
• Within heavy industry, maintenance planning, or logistics
• Structuring and simplifying complex issues
• Strong project and team management skills
• Building trust with industry leaders

* Research shows that while male candidates feel confident enough to apply when they meet about 60% of the requirements, female candidates only apply when they tick every box. So if this role has your name on it, but you’re not sure about the criteria, we still want to hear from you.

Interested?

You can apply for this position by using the link below. Whitespace Solutions is working with Top of Minds to fill this vacancy.