Hiring: Head of Product Development

About youStep 1 of 3

Full nameEmailPhone — optionalLocation and time zone — optionalLinkedIn — optionalPortfolio — optionalYour CV — PDF please, up to 4 MB; it is read as part of your applicationIntro video — required · a short video of you (1 to 2 minutes), MP4, MOV or WebM up to 100 MB, or a linkor a link anyone can open (YouTube, Vimeo, Loom, or Drive shared as “Anyone with the link”):Why this role? — optional

What is your expected monthly base fee in US dollars (full-time contractor)?

The budget is US$135–175K/yr base (US$11,250–14,600 per month), plus up to 20% of base in milestone bonuses. You would invoice us, for example through your own Hong Kong company. Give a single monthly figure or a tight range in USD.

What is the earliest date you could start?

If you have notice to serve or current client commitments, give the realistic first working day.

Where will you be based, and can you be inside factories, design agencies and studios in person every week?

This role is deliberately on the ground in the Pearl River Delta, even though the wider team is remote.

How would you describe your working Mandarin and English?

You will negotiate price, MOQ, tooling and quality with factories in Mandarin and report to a US-based CEO in English.

Which best describes your hands-on physical product development experience?

Count only physical consumer products you worked on hands-on from concept through to saleable mass production — not sourcing, re-badging or catalogue products.

Which best describes your most recent three to four years of work?

Pick the single closest description.

Which of these have you personally owned, rather than overseen someone else doing?

Tick only what you have done yourself on shipped products.

Industrial design direction Mechanical engineering and DFM Electronics, firmware and app-connected products Finding and vetting Pearl River Delta factories Negotiating price, MOQ, tooling and quality in Mandarin Tooling and mould ownership Landed cost, BOM and margin targets Patents filed in China and/or the US NNNs and IP assignments signed before factory contact QC, inspection and certification (FCC, CE, UL, food-contact) Stage gates (EVT/DVT/PVT) and documented SOPs Hiring and running contract engineers, design studios and hires

Link to one or more products you took to mass production

A retail or Amazon listing, brand product page, or a case study showing the finished product. If the work is confidential, link to whatever is public and say so in the next answer.

Pick one product you took from concept to mass production and tell us how it went, with numbers.

Please cover: your role and the dates; launch date versus the date in the brief; target versus actual landed cost and margin; first production run volume and peak monthly units; defect rate, return rate and star rating in the first 90 days; what patents, NNNs or IP assignments were in place before any factory saw the design; which factory and where; and why it worked. Approximate figures are fine if you say they are approximate.

Scenario: you have just closed DVT on an app-connected pet product due to launch in 11 weeks. The Dongguan factory says the tool change needed to fix a moulding defect adds three weeks and pushes landed cost 14% above the signed-off brief. A second factory could quote quickly, but has not seen the design. In a paragraph, what do you do, in what order, and what do you put in front of the CEO?

We are interested in your judgement on cost, schedule, IP exposure and quality, and in what you decide yourself versus escalate. A paragraph is enough — no need for a deck.

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Head of Product Development

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