Sr. Product Manager, Ecosystem & Partnerships at FORT Robotics
The Sr. Product Manager for Ecosystem & Partnerships is a visionary, leadership role focused on the integration and partnership layer that connects FORT to the broader physical AI world: OEM robotics platforms, channel partners, infrastructure providers, system integrators, and the emerging AI platforms reshaping how autonomous machines are deployed.
Strategic Leadership & Product Vision
Roadmap Ownership: Define and execute the 12-month ecosystem roadmap, prioritizing partner integrations, platform extensibility, and developer experience investments that drive platform adoption and market differentiation.
Partner Strategy: Build and maintain a structured view of the partner landscape: OEMs, system integrators, channel partners, and AI platform providers, identifying where FORT can become the embedded standard and sequencing investments accordingly.
Operator Interface Ecosystem: Own the product strategy for FORT's handheld operator interface ecosystem, ensuring the platform supports the full range of deployment environments: from warehouse floor operators to field integrators, with the right interface, SDK, and configurability story.
Market Intelligence: Track shifts in the physical AI, robotics, and industrial automation landscape, platform consolidations, new deployment verticals, regulatory changes, and translate them into proactive roadmap decisions before the market demands them.
Technical Execution & Ecosystem Governance
Integration Architecture: Define the integration specifications, API contracts, and data exchange standards that allow partners to embed FORT capabilities cleanly into their platforms: including hardware interfaces, telemetry pipelines, and operator-facing software.
Developer & Integrator Enablement: Build the product scaffolding that enables OEMs, channel partners, and system integrators to deploy FORT solutions at scale: SDKs, configuration tooling, onboarding frameworks, and developer documentation in partnership with the Technical Content Lead.
Cross-Platform Coordination: Serve as the integration layer between FORT's internal product pillars, Control, & Cloud, and external ecosystem requirements, managing cross-team dependencies and sequencing partner deliverables without breaking internal release cadences.
Quality & Validation: Partner with Engineering and QE to define integration acceptance criteria and validation protocols, ensuring partner integrations meet FORT's safety, reliability, and performance standards before they reach production deployments.
Stakeholder & Lifecycle Management
Executive Communication: Present ecosystem strategy, partner portfolio status, and integration progress to executive leadership, translating complex technical and commercial dynamics into clear business impact.
Partner Governance: Maintain structured oversight of the partner portfolio including integration status, roadmap dependencies, and commercial milestones. Surface blockers early and drive resolution across internal and external stakeholders.
Feedback Integration: Monitor partner deployment outcomes, field data, and support trends to identify systemic platform gaps. Feed structured market signal back into the product planning cycle.
Go-to-Market Support: Partner with Marketing and Sales to develop ecosystem narratives, partner launch playbooks, and technical collateral that position FORT as the platform of record for physical AI safety and control.
Qualifications
Experience: 5+ years of experience in Product Management, Technical Partnerships, or Business Development within robotics, industrial automation, IoT, or physical AI platforms, with a demonstrated track record of building and scaling partner ecosystems.
Platform Monetization: Proven ability to design and execute commercial models for embedded software/safety modules (e.g., licensing, per-robot, platform fees), focusing on translating safety capabilities into a revenue line within a partner's compute platform.
Technical Fluency: Comfortable making decisions at the intersection of APIs, sensor integration, telemetry, edge computing, and AI inference. Does not need to write code but must be credible in technical partner conversations.
AI-First Mindset: Understands how AI platforms connect to physical machine control and where FORT fits as the safety and control layer that makes autonomous systems trustworthy. Applies AI tools actively to accelerate their own work.
Embedded Ecosystem Experience: Expertise in integrating software or safety modules into third-party compute or silicon stacks. Proven ability to manage technical integration, commercial structures, and GTM strategies for edge AI and safety-rated platforms.
Technical Toolset: Proficiency in Monday.com and Jira for roadmap and project management; experience with API design review, partner integration documentation, and developer platform tooling.
Leadership: Strong collaborative skills with the ability to drive alignment across Engineering, Sales, and executive leadership without direct authority — through clarity, credibility, and consistent follow-through.
Drive: Deeply mission-aligned. Energized by the challenge of making the physical world safer and more productive through intelligent machine systems, and by building the ecosystem that makes that possible at scale.