Chief Product Officer — Interim, Industrial Automation

The mandate

Founder-led exception making created forty-seven controller, gateway and software variants with overlapping use cases and weak support economics. The founder's sudden departure left Engineering, Sales and Service each advancing a different roadmap.

The interim must start within three weeks for ten months while a permanent portfolio leader is recruited. The last six weeks are reserved for transferring the rationalised roadmap and customer commitments.

Handover requires a board-approved three-year portfolio, at least fifteen low-value variants on governed retirement, ninety per cent roadmap capacity tied to accepted priorities, and the successor chairing two product-investment cycles.

The CPO may stop roadmap items, set product requirements and retire variants inside approved customer obligations. New platforms above ₹5 crore, withdrawal affecting safety-certified installations and permanent director hires need committee approval; Sales owns price and Engineering owns technical design acceptance.

Factory automation delivery, enterprise ERP and service-organisation restructuring are excluded. The mandate decides what products the company will support and build, not every process used to make or sell them.

Why this seat is open

The founder had been the informal reconciliation mechanism for every portfolio conflict. Departure turned undocumented exceptions into operating risk and stranded capacity. A temporary CPO will make explicit choices before a permanent leader is asked to own future innovation.

What you will own

• Segment every variant by customer value, contribution, differentiation, installed-base risk and engineering burden.
• Decide invest, maintain, migrate or retire status with dated customer and technical actions.
• Establish product investment gates covering problem, evidence, economics, capacity and retirement consequence.
• Reallocate roadmap capacity from unapproved custom work to the accepted strategic portfolio.
• Publish migration paths for customers on overlapping or economically unsustainable variants.
• Reconcile product commitments across Sales, Engineering, Service and supply before quarterly approval.
• Transfer the portfolio logic, exception register and roadmap cadence to the permanent CPO.

Candidate qualifications

• More than twenty-two years in industrial automation, controls or B2B technology product leadership.
• Rationalised a complex hardware-software portfolio with a material installed-base and long support obligations.
• Strong command of product economics, platform strategy, migration, lifecycle and custom-engineering governance.
• Experience making retirement decisions where safety certification and customer operations constrain speed.
• Credibility with engineers and industrial sales teams when evidence requires refusal of bespoke demand.
• Successful succession from founder-led product decisions to institutional portfolio governance.

Non-negotiables

• Can join in Pune within three weeks and visit key industrial customers.
• No investment or advisory conflict involving automation competitors or channel partners.
• Prepared to retire founder-sponsored variants when evidence supports the decision.
• Available for the ten-month roadmap reset and permanent-leader transfer.

1. 49 words maximum. Confirm your availability and disclose any automation-company or channel advisory interests.
2. 49 words maximum. Which product variants did you retire, and what evidence overcame internal resistance?
3. 49 words maximum. How much roadmap capacity did you reallocate from custom work to platform priorities?