Director of Product Development

Director of Product

HydroJug, Inc. — Product Team

Ogden, UT | On-Site | Reports to the Chief Executive Officer

About the Role

The Director of Product owns HydroJug's new product development engine end to end — from opportunity identification through tooling, validation, and launch. This role sets the product roadmap for net-new physical products, runs the five-stage development process that moves them from concept to shelf, and builds the business cases that determine which products get funded and which do not.

This is an innovation seat, not a line-extension seat. HydroJug competes in a category where the winning product visibly does something the alternative does not. We are looking for someone whose portfolio is a series of genuinely differentiated products — premium materials, a feature you can demonstrate in five seconds, brought to market before the competition could answer it — rather than one successful product and the variants that followed it.

This is also a hands-on leadership seat rather than a governance seat. The Director of Product manages the industrial design team, chairs the day-to-day development process, and is accountable for the commercial outcome of the products that ship. The role exists to give a single owner to a function the company has run through its executive team to date.

Responsibilities

• Product Roadmap & Portfolio Strategy — Own the multi-year roadmap for net-new products. Decide what enters development, in what sequence, and against what commercial thesis. Maintain a live view of the portfolio's category coverage, margin profile, and cannibalization risk.
• Opportunity Identification — Build a continuous pipeline of product opportunities from consumer insight, category and competitive analysis, retailer feedback, and channel performance data. Convert that signal into defined product concepts with a stated consumer problem and a stated commercial case. This is a core accountability of the role, not a support activity — nobody hands this role a brief.
• Differentiation & Feature Innovation — Define what each product does that competing products do not, and make that claim provable. Own the functional thesis behind every program, the materials and finishes that support a premium position, and the intellectual property strategy that protects it. Repeatedly, across product families, not once.
• Business Cases & Trade-Off Analysis — Author the business case for every product entering development: volume and revenue forecast, landed cost and margin targets, tooling investment and payback, channel fit, and risk. Present explicit trade-off analysis — cost versus feature, speed versus certainty, tooling investment versus flexibility — and make a recommendation rather than presenting options.
• Stage-Gate Ownership — Run the five-stage new product development process end to end, holding every product to its gate criteria on design brief, concept selection, design for manufacture and value engineering, tooling and first-article sampling, and launch readiness. Prepare and defend gate submissions for executive sign-off.
• Development Execution — Drive products through CAD and tech pack development, prototyping and 3D-print validation, design for manufacture review with suppliers, value engineering to margin targets, tooling release, golden sample approval, and field testing.
• Materials & Finish Strategy — Select and specify the materials, coatings, and finishes that carry a premium product: insulation systems, metals and surface treatments, food-contact polymers and silicones, sealing and gasket systems, glass and ceramic. Own the cost, tooling, and quality consequences of those choices.
• Team Leadership — Manage and develop the industrial design team: set the design quality bar, allocate designer capacity across the portfolio, approve tech packs and callout sheets, and grow the technical depth of the group.
• Cross-Functional Delivery — Partner with Sourcing, Supply Chain, Quality, Finance, Legal, Marketing, and the sales channels to clear the dependencies a product needs to launch. Hold standing service-level agreements with those functions and escalate breaches rather than absorbing them.
• Intellectual Property & Compliance — Coordinate patent, trademark, and design-right strategy with counsel, with an emphasis on utility protection for genuine mechanisms, and ensure regulatory and safety clearance is complete before tooling release.
• Speed-to-Market Lane — Maintain an expedited development path for fast-turn product programs, collaborations, and finish-level customizations that ship outside the standard development calendar without dropping below the quality standard.
• Supplier & Factory Partnership — Own the technical relationship with overseas manufacturing partners, including factory selection input, sampling cadence, and on-site development trips as required.

Qualifications

Required

• 8 years in product development, product management, or category leadership for physical consumer products, with at least 3 years leading a team or owning a category
• A portfolio of multiple distinct, differentiated products across more than one product family — not one successful product and its line extensions. You should be able to name, for each, what the product did that competing products could not
• Demonstrated ownership of consumer hard goods from concept through mass production — products that shipped and sold, not concepts that stalled
• Commercial ownership, not only technical execution. You have carried a category or P&L number, decided what to fund and what to kill, and lived with the sell-through result. A purely technical or engineering career history is not a fit for this seat
• Working fluency in the mechanics of physical product development — CAD and tech packs, tolerances and materials, design for manufacture, value engineering, tooling types and timelines, first-article and golden sample approval. You can still read a drawing and evaluate a designer's work
• Proven ability to build and defend a product business case: volume and revenue forecasting, landed cost and margin modeling, tooling investment and payback analysis, and written trade-off analysis
• Direct experience running a formal stage-gate development process, including authoring gate submissions and enforcing gate criteria under schedule pressure
• Premium materials and finish fluency — you can explain why a material, coating, or sealing system was chosen, what it cost, and what it did to the tooling
• Experience managing overseas manufacturing partners directly, including factory selection, sampling cycles, and technical specification handoff. Not through a sourcing agent
• Experience hiring, managing, and developing designers or product developers
• Track record of moving quickly — you have compressed the distance between an insight and a proven product on shelf, and can speak to what was traded away to do it

Preferred

• Background at a consumer products company known for repeated feature innovation in premium hard goods, where product development is the competitive strategy rather than a support function
• Named inventor on utility patents for consumer products
• Experience with drinkware, housewares, premium outdoor, small appliance, or consumer device categories
• Exposure to both direct-to-consumer and national retail channels, including retailer-exclusive product programs
• Grew into product leadership from a technical or design foundation rather than a purely commercial one

Reporting & Organization

The Director of Product reports to the Chief Executive Officer and sits on the Product team.

The role manages the industrial design group — a Senior Industrial Designer / Design Lead and two Industrial Designers — with three direct reports at hire and the expectation of growing the function as product volume scales.

The Director of Product partners closely with a dedicated Product Manager for new product development, who is matrixed onto the Product team from Operations and owns the day-to-day process cadence, the project tracking system, and cross-functional coordination.

The role presents at the Product Board, a standing cross-functional forum comprising the CEO and senior leaders from ecommerce, sales, marketing, brand, and customer experience, which provides gate feedback across the product portfolio. Final sign-off authority on design brief, tooling release, and launch readiness gates is retained by the CEO.

This role is based on-site in Ogden, Utah. Relocation support is available.

Compensation & Benefits

This is a base-salary role. HydroJug pays market for the function and the experience of the person. Director-level seats at HydroJug are not bonus-eligible, and HydroJug does not offer equity — the base salary is the whole offer, and the number you see is the number.

Benefits include a 401(k) with a QACA safe harbor match to a maximum of 3.5% of pay at a 6% employee contribution, fully vested after two years; employer-subsidized medical premiums at the Manager tier; and 20 days of paid time off plus 12 paid holidays.

Relocation support is available and is handled separately from base salary.

About HydroJug, Inc.

HydroJug, Inc. is a consumer brand headquartered in Ogden, Utah, designing and selling premium hydration and lifestyle products through direct-to-consumer and major retail channels.