Product Manager
Information Technology · Cedar Falls, IA · On-site · Full-time
Martin Bros. builds its own software — the systems that run our sales, warehouse, transportation, and customer service, and that shape the experience we deliver to thousands of foodservice operators. We're hiring a Product Manager to own that portfolio end to end and to lead the team of business analysts behind it.
The role has unusually wide surface area. In a single day you might work through a data model with an engineer, sit with a driver or a customer service rep to see where a process actually breaks, and frame a roadmap trade-off for leadership. You'll own the full lifecycle — discovery, definition, delivery, and measurement — and the difficulty isn't in any one layer. It's in moving fluently between them and recognizing which layer the real problem lives in.
This is a senior role for someone who has practiced product management at a high level and is ready to set the standard for how it's done here. You'll have real ownership, a modern stack, and a genuine mandate to build AI into the products we ship — not as a talking point, but as a tool you use daily and expect your team to use as well.
What you'll own
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Discovery and definition. Build deep, current knowledge of how the business runs, and spend real time with customers and frontline employees — interviews, workshops, ride-alongs, shadowing — to find the problems worth solving. Observe the work; don't rely on how it's described in a meeting. Get to root cause before proposing solutions, then translate what you learn into specifications, user stories, and acceptance criteria precise enough to build from without constant clarification.
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Delivery. Partner closely with the development team through the build — refining requirements, answering questions, reviewing work, and accepting it — inside an Agile/Scrum workflow. Set product direction and maintain a prioritized backlog grounded in business value, customer impact, technical health, and operational risk.
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Measurement. Define the KPIs that tell you whether a product is working, ensure the instrumentation to measure them is captured during the build, and hold the portfolio to evidence rather than assertion. When the data contradicts the plan, change the plan.
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The team. Lead the business analysts as their direct manager — hiring to a high bar, setting clear expectations, coaching on craft, and giving direct feedback continuously rather than at review cycles. You own the team's output and its growth.
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AI in practice. Use modern AI tools in your own work daily, and drive the team to embed AI into our products where it creates real value — and to leave it out where it doesn't.
What we're looking for
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A hands-on operator who digs into problems personally and gets to root cause, rather than escalating or deferring.
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Technically credible — you read code at a basic level, reason about APIs and integrations, and hold a substantive conversation with engineers about implementation trade-offs.
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Fluent with data — you write SQL, work comfortably in BI tools, and reason quantitatively about product decisions.
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A clear communicator who adjusts depth and framing for the audience, from a warehouse associate describing a workflow to an executive weighing a trade-off.
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An experienced people leader who has built and developed a team, set clear expectations, and given the direct feedback that makes people better.
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Someone who runs concurrent initiatives without dropping threads and holds a high bar for their own work and the team's.
What you'll need
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10+ years in product, business analysis, or software delivery, including 5+ years as a product manager or senior business analyst, with a track record of shipping software that produced measurable business outcomes.
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Direct people management experience — you've hired, led, and developed a team of analysts or comparable knowledge workers.
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Working familiarity with modern web stacks (Java, REST APIs, SPAs/JavaScript frameworks), relational databases, cloud platforms (AWS preferred), and enterprise integrations (ERP, e-commerce, EDI).
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Daily, hands-on use of AI tools to improve your own and your team's productivity.
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Experience in an Agile/Scrum environment with tools like Jira and Confluence.
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A bachelor's degree in information technology or a related field.
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Foodservice, distribution, supply chain, or comparably operationally complex industry experience is a plus.
About Martin Bros.
Martin Bros. is an employee-owned foodservice distributor based in Cedar Falls, Iowa. We keep a flat organization, which means decisions are made close to the work and ownership is real rather than nominal — a good fit for someone who wants the latitude to make the call and see it through. Our software is held to the same standard as everything else we put in front of a customer, and this role sets that standard for the portfolio.
