Product Innovation Manager

Salary: $110k - $135k SummaryThis role leads the end-to-end identification, development, and commercialization of newproducts for Seremoni Grade™ seafood, translating category whitespace and consumer insightinto a prioritized innovation roadmap that supports our growth and margin targets. It’s a hands-on, builder role: you’ll own the innovation funnel from concept through launch, balancing near-term wins for the core business with the longer-term platform bets that will define Seremoni’snext 3–5 years — acting as the connective tissue between R&D, operations, sales, and leadership. As one of the first dedicated innovation hires, you’ll also help establish the processes and rigor that will scale with the company. What You’ll DoOwn and evolve Seremoni’s product innovation portfolio: develop the innovation strategy and product roadmap to ensure that Seremoni meets the financial targets.Balance near-term and long-term innovation: deliver core-business launches that hit this year’s targets while building the 3–5 year platform bets — new species, product and packaging formats, or new channels — that set up Seremoni’s next phase of growth.Apply a Jobs-to-Be-Done lens to ideation: identify the underlying need a consumer, diner, chef or customer is hiring a product to satisfy, and use that lens to separate genuinely differentiated ideas from me-too concepts.Set the innovation guardrails: define what whitespace is genuinely worth chasing, so the pipeline stays focused on the right bets.Manage new product launches end-to-end: lead the NPD process from ideation through consumer insights, concept testing, formulation, plant trials, and packaging development, staying on as the owner of product intent all the way through commercialization and into market. Build a disciplined innovation process and tools covering both stage gate and portfolio management.Shape positioning for new product lines: in partnership with Marketing, define how each new launch sits alongside Seremoni Grade™ and the existing lineup, so the portfolio tells one coherent story.Serve as the central innovation hub and subject matter expert for value-added seafood: track category trends, competitive launches, and retail/foodservice whitespace across seafood and adjacent proteins, translating raw data into recommendations leadership can act on.Build and validate the business case for every innovation project: size the opportunity, model margin and COGS, and run the testing and consumer work needed to de-risk each launch before it scales. What You’ll OwnPrioritization and sequencing of the innovation pipeline, in partnership with leadershipGo/no-go recommendations at each stage gatePositioning recommendations for new product lines and brand extensions, in partnership with MarketingSelection of testing partners, co-packers, and vendors for active NPD projectsResourcing asks from R&D, Operations, and Sales for projects in flight What You’ll Need3–5 years in product development, innovation, or category management in CPG food/beverageA track record of taking products from concept to shelf, fluent in running a stage-gated NPD process end-to-endAbility to translate market insight into sharp product briefs and sales narratives, and to assess risk/reward with imperfect informationExperience partnering cross-functionally with R&D, supply chain, and salesStrong quantitative fluency: market sizing, COGS optimization, margin modeling, and data analyticsExcellent communication across audiences, from R&D technicians to executive leadershipResilience and resourcefulness — this is a startup, and the org chart is still being built Nice to haveExperience with seafood or another animal protein categoryFamiliarity with Jobs-to-Be-Done or similar consumer-insight frameworks