Senior Manager/Director of Product and Application Strategy

Role Overview

The Fynder Group is looking for a seasoned product leader to bridge customer demands, technical capabilities, and business strategies for the Fy platform. This position requires shaping opportunity strategy while managing product lines: spotting promising application areas, translating scientific findings into compelling market value propositions, and steering product development, pricing, roadmaps, and commercialization plans.

Key Responsibilities

• Maintain and prioritize a pipeline of application opportunities across the Fy platform focusing on promising customer segments and use cases.
• Distinguish areas where Fy can deliver unique value and areas with less competitive advantage, setting priorities based on customer needs, technical feasibility, economic value, and strategic alignment.
• Convert formulation and technical data into clear value propositions relevant to customers and build value-in-use models segmented by application and customer.
• Position Fy against existing ingredients and alternative technologies through strong internal and external narratives grounded in customer purchasing behavior.
• Translate market insights, customer feedback, and technical learnings into effective product positioning, defining commercial products, their variants, and developing roadmaps to guide product evolution.
• Help prioritize capabilities, product forms, and use cases to focus company resources effectively, managing trade-offs between opportunities and development initiatives.
• Lead pricing strategy and value architecture development across key applications and customer segments while supporting prioritization considering customer needs and internal resource constraints.
• Contribute to business case development, sequencing decisions, and major opportunity go/no-go recommendations.
• Influence commercialization strategies and launch-readiness plans for priority initiatives.
• Integrate market and customer insights into ingredient science and application teams, shaping hypotheses and evaluating commercial relevance of experiments.
• Recommend when deeper experimentation is necessary and identify opportunities that can be advanced or discarded based on analysis.
• Convert technical findings into hypotheses for new products or market opportunities.

Candidate Profile and Skills

• Strong technical knowledge in food ingredients, formulation tradeoffs, structure-function relationships, rheology, texture, nutritional value, and value-in-use.
• Sharp commercial intuition with the ability to align customer needs, technical functionality, and economic considerations into actionable product strategies.
• Proven ability to synthesize diverse customer, market, and technical data into clear product hypotheses.
• Balance between instinctive judgment, pattern recognition, and analytical rigor.
• Effective collaboration with scientific and formulation teams while anchoring decisions in commercial priorities.
• Excellent communication skills for internal technical dialogue and external customer engagement.
• Self-directed with capacity to create organizational structure in a fast-changing environment.
• Intellectual curiosity and a methodical approach to complex problem-solving.
• Strategic mindset focused on long-term platform strength beyond immediate successes.

Additional Information

Experience in selling to food industry clients or leading customer-facing technical workshops is valuable but not mandatory. The key attributes are a robust technical foundation, instinct for selecting opportunities, sound business judgment, and the ability to connect scientific insights to commercially driven decisions.

The company may utilize artificial intelligence tools to assist aspects of the recruitment process, such as application review and resume analysis. However, all final hiring decisions will be human-led. For questions about data processing, applicants may reach out to the company directly.