Principal Product Manager at Dalton Mills

Job description

About Dalton Mills Dalton Mills is building an AI operating system for the trades. Contractors use plain language to create software tailored to how their businesses operate, without writing code. Most field-service software is designed to serve a broad market. As a result, the workflows that matter to a particular trade or business often go unsupported for years. Dalton Mills gives contractors a common agentic foundation and the ability to adapt it to their own operations. A forty-truck plumbing company and a two-person pest control business can start with the same platform and shape it into very different products. Dalton Mills is backed by Founder Collective, FPV, and angels including Gokul Rajaram. The role You’ll join an early-stage company with an established roadmap and an active shipping cadence. As our Principal Product Manager, you’ll own product direction and the outcomes our product produces. That includes developing a deep understanding of our customers, deciding which problems we should solve, leading the roadmap and priorities, and ensuring that what we ship advances both our customers’ businesses and ours. Because this is an early and senior role, its scope will expand as the company grows. The team has a roadmap and is actively shipping against it today. You’ll take ownership of that roadmap, including the problems we prioritize, how we sequence the work, the scope of each release, and how we measure success. You’ll evolve it as customer evidence, company priorities, and our technical understanding change. This is a company-wide leadership role. You’ll partner with leadership and the engineering team on product and technical direction, and with customer-facing teams on positioning, launches, adoption, and what we learn from the market. You’ll help set product strategy with the leadership team and own the decisions that shape the product: which problems we solve, what we prioritize, how we scope the work, and how we measure success. We expect you to bring an independent point of view, challenge assumptions when the evidence supports it, and help the company make better decisions. You’ll work closely with our principal software engineers as a peer, with distinct and complementary responsibilities. You’ll be accountable for the customer problem, product priorities, and business outcome. They’ll be accountable for technical direction and engineering quality. Together, you’ll shape solutions, make tradeoffs, and build a product and operating model that can scale. This is also a hands-on role. In a typical week, you might spend time with contractors, make a roadmap decision, align a launch across the company, work through product and technical tradeoffs with engineering, prototype an idea with AI tools, and assess how a recent release is performing. What you’ll do • Own product direction, the roadmap, priorities, and outcomes, with clear authority to change course when customer evidence or company needs support it. • Develop a deep understanding of how contractors operate through ride-alongs, office visits, support calls, interviews, and recorded demos. • Bring customer and market evidence into company planning and recommend where the product can create the most value. • Build alignment across leadership, engineering, and customer-facing teams on product choices, tradeoffs, launches, and outcomes. • Partner with our Principal Software Engineer and the engineering team from discovery through delivery, combining product, business, and technical judgment. • Lead product work from problem definition through launch and iteration. Write clear briefs, specifications, and decision documents that give the team the context it needs. • Make product decisions promptly, communicate them clearly, and identify the choices that deserve broader company discussion. • Define measures of success, observe products in use, and remain accountable for whether the work achieves its intended customer and business outcomes. • Use AI tools, prototypes, and lightweight analysis to answer questions before committing significant engineering time. • Establish and improve how Dalton Mills practices product management as the company and team grow. What you’ll bring • A track record of leading consequential software products from discovery through launch and iteration, ideally in a principal, staff, or similarly senior product role. • Experience owning broad product outcomes rather than a narrow portion of a larger roadmap. • Strong written communication. You can produce clear briefs, specifications, and decision documents that help a small team move quickly. • Good judgment about pace and evidence. You know when more customer research is necessary and when the fastest way to learn is to ship a focused version. • The ability to develop a detailed understanding of how customers work and to distinguish individual requests from broader product opportunities. • Credibility with experienced engineers. You do not need to write production code, but you should be able to engage thoughtfully on technical constraints, tradeoffs, and possibilities. • Regular experience building or prototyping with AI tools, or a strong interest in making them part of your daily work. • A low-ego, high-ownership approach. You take responsibility for problems, communicate directly, and move work toward resolution. Helpful, but not required • Experience with field service, vertical SaaS, or the trades. • Early-stage or zero-to-one product experience. • Experience shipping agentic or LLM-based products to production. • Experience operating or working inside a contracting business. How we work Our values are Learn, Earn, Show, and Go. Together, they describe how we make decisions and work with one another. • Learn continuously. Stay curious, seek evidence, and be willing to revise your view. • Earn trust. Follow through on commitments and communicate difficult information directly. • Show through the work. Use prototypes, customer evidence, and shipped products to make ideas concrete. • Make progress. Take initiative and address problems without waiting for unnecessary permission or process. We are building an agentic organization as well as an agentic product. We share context broadly through open channels and recorded calls, and we use AI agents alongside people in our everyday work. We believe this approach helps a small team learn and move quickly. Our stack Everyone at Dalton Mills is expected to be comfortable building and experimenting, regardless of title. Product managers use tools such as Claude and Codex to prototype and answer questions before involving engineering. Our current stack includes Claude Code, Codex, Linear, Vercel, Railway, Supabase, and GitHub. We are pragmatic about tools and will change them as our needs evolve.

Requirements

Must-haves

Because this is an early and senior role, its scope will expand as the company grows.
What you’ll do
Own product direction, the roadmap, priorities, and outcomes, with clear authority to change course when customer evidence or company needs support it.
Develop a deep understanding of how contractors operate through ride-alongs, office visits, support calls, interviews, and recorded demos.
Bring customer and market evidence into company planning and recommend where the product can create the most value.
Build alignment across leadership, engineering, and customer-facing teams on product choices, tradeoffs, launches, and outcomes.
Partner with our Principal Software Engineer and the engineering team from discovery through delivery, combining product, business, and technical judgment.
Lead product work from problem definition through launch and iteration. Write clear briefs, specifications, and decision documents that give the team the context it needs.
Make product decisions promptly, communicate them clearly, and identify the choices that deserve broader company discussion.
Define measures of success, observe products in use, and remain accountable for whether the work achieves its intended customer and business outcomes.
Use AI tools, prototypes, and lightweight analysis to answer questions before committing significant engineering time.
Establish and improve how Dalton Mills practices product management as the company and team grow.
What you’ll bring
A track record of leading consequential software products from discovery through launch and iteration, ideally in a principal, staff, or similarly senior product role.
Experience owning broad product outcomes rather than a narrow portion of a larger roadmap.
Strong written communication. You can produce clear briefs, specifications, and decision documents that help a small team move quickly.
Good judgment about pace and evidence. You know when more customer research is necessary and when the fastest way to learn is to ship a focused version.
The ability to develop a detailed understanding of how customers work and to distinguish individual requests from broader product opportunities.
Credibility with experienced engineers. You do not need to write production code, but you should be able to engage thoughtfully on technical constraints, tradeoffs, and possibilities.
Regular experience building or prototyping with AI tools, or a strong interest in making them part of your daily work.
A low-ego, high-ownership approach. You take responsibility for problems, communicate directly, and move work toward resolution.
Helpful, but not required
Experience with field service, vertical SaaS, or the trades.
Early-stage or zero-to-one product experience.

Nice-to-haves

None flagged.

Application prep

Use the role’s language and application details while tailoring your materials.

Keywords to mirror

aigollm

Platform: gem
Effort: medium