Chief Product Officer & Co-Founder - AgTech Marketing Platform

High Alpha Innovation partners with the world’s leading organizations to innovate through startup creation. Part strategy consultancy, part venture studio, our team is a diverse mix of highly experienced company builders, designers, and strategists who work with corporate and university partners to source, launch, and invest in venture studios and advantaged startups.

Our newest company, Make Hay, is seeking a Chief Product Officer to partner with the CEO to bring to market a B2B marketing software platform that enables brands to produce authentic and trusted agricultural-related marketing content at scale. Given a growing customer demand and interest, businesses such as CPGs, QSRs, Food Retailers, and others would like to be able to tell the story about where their food comes from. Make Hay will empower farmers to create authentic and trusted content. Marketing professionals are aware of the demand for this authentic and ‘always-on’ content to help fuel more engaging storytelling, however, they struggle to meet this demand due to an antiquated content creation process and resource constraints. 

Make Hay’s platform will help brand managers to translate their vision into ultra-specific marketing briefs, and then deliver those briefs directly to the farmers/ag producers who will then have the ability to develop original content that fulfills that need. Make Hay’s platform will enable farmers to meet these content needs by allowing them to become content creators and tell their authentic stories, which will ultimately help create an additional new revenue stream for farmers- farmers as trusted paid content creators. 

As the Chief Product Officer, you bring deep industry experience in the social media and content creation space and understand how to create products that are simple and easy to adopt within the agriculture industry. You will lead a team of outsourced developers to build a product that will be used by both Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) and Quick Service Restaurants (QSR) professionals as well as farmers and other agriculture and supply chain users. This is an opportunity to build a product from the ground up that can have an immense impact on the agriculture and food industries. 

As the Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder, you will be responsible for building a big, important, durable business from the ground up. As the product leader, you will work to build the MVP, be the voice of the customer through discovery and implementation, and partner with the CEO to define the product roadmap and go-to-market strategy. This is a unique opportunity to be hands-on with users across the agriculture and food retail industry while building a product and service from scratch. 

Requirements

• Demonstrated experience in building SaaS products from scratch and leading high-performing engineering and product teams
• Experience or exposure to solving complex problems in the AgriFood, CPG, and marketing space is preferred
• A “player-coach” mentality with the ability to provide both high-level product and technical strategy as well as executing on key deliverables. This is a hands-on role and this position will require a leader who can lead and motivate teams while also actively contributing to technical and product development tasks
• Deep empathy for the problems facing both CPG marketing teams and the agriculture industry
• Experience building products for tech-adverse industries such as agriculture, construction, or other industrial industries that are easy to adapt and navigate from a UI/UX perspective
• 10+ years of product management experience, including hands-on implementation experience for enterprise technology or technology-enabled services companies
• 5+ years of experience managing or leading software development and product teams with experience building and managing a team of remote software developers
• Familiarity with modern technologies, frameworks, and tools used across the entire stack
• Ability to travel as needed for early customer implementation and discovery

Responsibilities:

• Serve as a co-founder and executive partner to the CEO, assisting in shaping company strategy and vision while participating in building conviction in the market, with investors, and customers
• Maintain an industry-expert level of understanding and contribute to strategic conversations relating to relevant products and technology in the agri-food industry
• Translate customer needs and map the client journey into a product vision and roadmap that delivers customer and user value, and is achievable and distinctive in the marketplace
• Direct and lead technical and product-related discussions including scalability, security, technical debt, processes and methodologies, best practices and cloud architecture