About the Job
As a key growth accelerator, A11 partners with Europe’s most ambitious startups and scaleups, corporates and SMBs to connect them with top-tier talent ready to make an impact.
We're looking for a motivated Founding Product Manager (m/f/d) to join and build the product function at one of our Ecosystem companies.
As a Founding Product Manager, you'll be the first product manager and work side by side with the founders to help decide what we build, for whom, and why; your decisions shape the product from your first week. Public procurement still runs on fragmented portals and PDFs nobody reads in time. We're live with customers, we talk to them constantly, and every conversation shows us where the product needs to go. You'll make sure we learn faster than anyone else in this market and turn that into the product our customers use to win public contracts, learning the product by owning real decisions, seeing what they do in real usage, and working next to the founders who have shaped this product from day one.
Join the A11 Ecosystem - a next-generation procurement platform redefining how businesses discover, evaluate, and win public tenders across one of the world's largest yet most fragmented markets: €2 trillion in annual contract volume, scattered across 4,500+ portals in 29 countries. It harnesses qualified AI matching and agentic workflow automation to surface only the tenders that fit, analyze 100+ page documents in 30 seconds, and draft winning bids in minutes. Backed by leading investors, the company is scaling fast toward becoming the category-defining player in European public procurement.
In this role, you’ll:
Talk to customers every week and run your own product sessions, digging into how bid teams actually work, from the first tender alert to the final submission
Turn insights into bets: form hypotheses, design experiments, define what success looks like, and let the data decide
Own the roadmap and defend it with evidence
Work side by side with engineering: shape the solution, write the specs, and get it shipped
After release, watch what customers actually do, talk to them again, and decide what to double down on
Build the system that captures every customer signal, from interviews to sales calls to support requests
Bring the founders your sharpest insights: which problems keep coming up, which segments respond, and where we should go next
Typical tasks (first 90 days):
Become the team's go-to person for what our customers need
Own the roadmap, with every item tracing back to what customers told us
Get your first experiments live, with at least one idea killed on data before anyone wrote a line of code
Help the team run twice as many customer conversations, with nothing learned getting lost
Run product day-to-day so the founders can focus on scaling the company
Your Profile:
Must haves:
1+ year of hands-on product experience, ideally in B2B SaaS. Strong internships, side projects, or your own startup count too
You've shipped something real, at work or on your own, and can show what changed because of it
You run customer interviews yourself and turn what you hear into clear decisions
You test assumptions with qualitative and quantitative data instead of guessing
You write specs engineers can build from and understand enough tech to discuss trade-offs
Fluent German and English
Nice-to-haves:
Experience with AI products, including judging output quality, not just shipping features
A background in UX research or design
Domain experience in procurement, bid management, or other document-heavy B2B workflows
You've set up product analytics and know which events matter
Comfortable building AI-native workflows with tools like Claude Code, n8n, or comparable, to make research and synthesis compound
You might be a fit if you:
Want to learn product from founders, not from a playbook
Would rather test an idea with five customers than debate it in a meeting
Get a kick out of seeing customers use something you pushed…