Senior Product Manager (hardgoods)

About Sidekick

At Sidekick, our mission is simple: help people recover faster from persistent injuries. Trusted by Olympic champions and everyday individuals, our products have been featured in Men's Health, Running Magazine, and more. With 94% of users reporting relief from chronic pain, we're on a mission to become the go-to injury relief brand.

About the Role

We're looking for a Senior Product Manager to own products end to end, from spotting the opportunity, to defining what gets built, to signing off the first production run.

The hardest part of this job is commercial judgment. Lots of people can build a product that works. We need someone who can tell, before we spend a dollar on tooling, whether a product will  sell. This person will think deeply about who it's for, why they'll choose it over what already exists, what they'll pay, and whether it makes money at that price. You'll need enough engineering depth to hold your own with our engineers and our factories. But the unique skill we’re looking for in this role is commercial instinct.

You'll report to the CEO and work daily with our Industrial Designer, engineers, physiotherapist, Chief Growth Officer, operations team and manufacturing partners. You'll run 4–8 products at different stages at once. We're launching aggressively over the next two years and expanding well beyond the products we sell today.

Key Responsibilities

1) Find and define the opportunity

• Hunt for unmet needs — customer interviews, review mining, physio conversations, category data, competitive teardowns. You bring us ideas; you don't wait for a list.
• Think in short and long — quick wins that earn revenue this quarter, and bigger bets that define where we are in two years.
• Build the case — market size, target price, target margin, positioning, and the assumptions that have to be true. Then test them cheaply before we commit.

2) Develop, produce and launch it

• Own the specs and brief so it’s clear what needs to be built.
• Own cost and margin — BOM, quotes, vendor selection, and the spec tradeoffs that you’ll need to make to hit cost targets.
• Drive prototyping — work with our Industrial Designer and engineers to build, test and iterate prototypes until the design is ready for manufacturing.
• Validate with real users — run focus groups and testing, document pass/fail against every requirement, and make the call when a prototype falls short, costs come in over, or testing says pivot.
• Drive DFM and tooling — approve pre-tooling samples, verify tolerances, sign off tooling and the golden sample.
• Take it to market — close out compliance, packaging, manuals, product photography, then oversee the first production run and set the QC criteria, inspection standards and handover docs that keep it right at scale.

Requirements

• 5+ years developing mechanical consumer products. Plastic injection molded parts, mechanical assemblies, tooled hardware.
• Deep familiarity with injection molding. Draft, wall thickness, gate location, sink, tool actions, cavitation, and what each one does to unit cost and tooling cost.
• You've shipped at least 10 products. Enough have succeeded that you know what good looks like, and enough have failed that you can tell us exactly why.
• You've owned commercial outcomes, not just delivery. You've set or shaped retail price, defended a margin target, and can tell us how your products actually performed after launch.
• You've personally taken products through tooling to mass production. You know what a T1 sample is, what usually goes wrong at tooling kickoff, and how to tell when a factory's "yes" means "no."
• Engineering foundation. A mechanical engineering background is ideal, with equivalent hands-on experience.

Strong plus

• Background or serious personal involvement in physiotherapy, rehab, strength training, coaching or endurance sport. Our customers are in pain — understanding that from the inside is worth more to us than a trend report.
• Experience with regulated consumer products and medical devices.
• Direct-to-consumer and Amazon experience.

What Separates a Good PM From a Great One

A good PM executes an idea well. A great one finds the idea, argues honestly about whether it deserves to exist, and then builds a brief so sharp that every downstream decision gets easier. And when the exciting part is over and it's week fourteen of tooling revisions, they're still the one making sure the radius is right.

Benefits

• $100,000–$130,000 CAD base, depending on experience

• Comprehensive health benefits
• Hybrid — Toronto office, with work-from-home days
• Work with smart people, no bureaucracy
• Clear path to Head of Product as the team grows