Senior Product Manager, Warehouse Execution Systems (WES) & Material Handling

About the Role

Stord's Distribution Centers are getting faster, denser, and more automated — and the software gap between "robots on the floor" and "orders out the door" is the single biggest lever we have left to pull. This role owns that gap.

We're building a homegrown Warehouse Execution System (WES) — the orchestration layer that sits between our WMS (S1W) and the physical automation on our DC floors (goods-to-person, AS/RS, sortation, conveyor, robotics) — and decides, in real time, what work gets released, to whom, and in what order. This is not a vendor-integration role where you glue together AutoStore's API and call it done. You are building the brain that makes automation actually behave like it's part of one system, not five bolted-on ones.

You'll also spend meaningful time supporting Stord's Innovation Lab, which means you're not just shipping roadmap items — you're running structured experiments on new material handling concepts, automation pilots, and "should we even build this" bets before they become roadmap items for everyone else.

This is a senior role with director-level scope: with possible direct reports in the future,  you will own strategy, architecture tradeoffs, and stakeholder alignment across Product, Engineering, Ops, and DC leadership with minimal hand-holding. 

What You'll Own

WES Product Strategy & Roadmap

• Define and own the product vision, strategy, and roadmap for Stord's homegrown WES — including work release logic, task/order prioritization, labor-and-automation resource balancing, and exception handling.

• Own the build-vs-defer tradeoffs on WES scope — this system will not do everything on day one, and you're the one who says what's in v1 vs. v3.

Material Handling & Automation Orchestration

• Design how WES coordinates across heterogeneous automation types — goods-to-person (AutoStore-class), AS/RS, conveyor/sortation, and robotics — even though we're building the orchestration layer ourselves rather than buying it.

• Partner with Engineering and Controls/Automation stakeholders to define the contracts (data, timing, failure modes) between WES and physical equipment, so this doesn't become a science project that only works in the demo warehouse.

• Build the operational logic for real-world failure conditions: equipment down, congestion spikes, mixed manual/automated backup flows. Automation vendors' brochures assume nothing ever breaks. You don't get that luxury.

• Design and own the plan for building a plug and play integration layer.

Innovation Lab Support

• Scope, run, and evaluate structured pilots on new material handling and automation concepts before they get roadmap real estate.

• Build the "is this worth building" case — cost, throughput, labor impact, integration complexity — with enough rigor that a "no" is as valuable a deliverable as a "yes."

• Bridge Innovation Lab findings back into the core WES roadmap so pilots don't die in a folder no one opens again.

Cross-Functional & Stakeholder Leadership

• Operate as the connective tissue between DC Operations, Engineering, Controls/Automation teams, and executive stakeholders — translating floor-level reality into product requirements and vice versa.

• Own metrics that tie WES performance to business outcomes: throughput, order cycle time, labor utilization, automation uptime, and exception rate — not vanity feature-shipped counts.

• Present roadmap, tradeoffs, and pilot outcomes to SLT with the clarity and brevity expected at that altitude — no one up there wants your Jira board, they want your point of view.

What You'll Need (Non-Negotiables)

• 5-7+ years in product management, with a substantial chunk of that in operationally complex, physical-world environments — warehouse/DC operations, supply chain systems, manufacturing execution, or robotics/automation. If your product experience is entirely SaaS-dashboard-and-funnel, this role will eat you alive.

• Direct exposure to warehouse execution, WMS, WCS, or material handling automation concepts — you should already know the difference between a WMS, a WCS, and a WES without googling it, and be able to explain why that distinction actually matters operationally.

• Demonstrated ability to zoom from system architecture to floor-level workflow and back — you need to be equally comfortable in a data model conversation with engineers and a "why did pick rate drop 8% on third shift" conversation with a DC ops manager.

• A track record of owning ambiguous, build-it-yourself product scope — this is not a "here's the vendor roadmap, prioritize the backlog" job. There is no vendor roadmap. You're writing it.

• Strong written and verbal communication — you'll be translating between engineers, ops leaders, and executives multiple times a day, often about the same problem, in three different vocabularies.

• Comfort with experimentation and structured ambiguity for the Innovation Lab portion — you need to be able to design a pilot with a real kill criterion, not just "let's try it and see."

• Willingness to travel to DC sites — this system does not get built correctly from a conference room. If you're not willing to stand on a warehouse floor and watch where your logic breaks, this isn't the role. Role based at Innovation lab in Atlanta

• Hands-on exposure - to specific MHE/automation platforms (AutoStore, Knapp, Dematic, Honeywell Intelligrated/Momentum, HAI Robotics, Swisslog) — even if we're not integrating their software directly, knowing how these systems actually behave under load is a real advantage.

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience building 0-to-1 internal/homegrown platforms (not just configuring vendor software).

• Background in industrial engineering, operations research, or a discipline that makes "labor and automation resource balancing" something you find genuinely interesting rather than exhausting.

• Experience with real-time systems, event-driven architectures, or optimization/scheduling logic.

What Success Looks Like (First 3 Months)

• WES v1 core work-release and prioritization logic is live in at least one DC, with a clear, data-backed case for expansion.

• At least one Innovation Lab pilot has gone from concept to a documented go/no-go decision with real operational data behind it.

• DC Ops and Engineering both describe you, unprompted, as "the person who actually gets what happens on the floor" — not "the PM who writes nice docs."

• SLT has a clear, credible picture of WES's trajectory and ROI without you having to re-explain the fundamentals every time.

A Word of Caution (Read Before Applying)

This role sits at the intersection of unfinished software, real steel, and a warehouse that does not pause for your sprint planning. If you want a clean roadmap and a vendor to blame when integrations break, this is the wrong job — there's no vendor here, just you, engineering, and the floor. If that sounds like the interesting part rather than the scary part, apply.