Product Owner

WasteHero · Cairo, Egypt (Hybrid)

WasteHero builds the operating system for modern waste management. Our SaaS platform runs route planning, CRM, billing, citizen services, and container logistics for municipal and private waste operators across the Nordics and the Middle East.

We are not an early-stage. We have long-term contracts with public institutions serving millions of citizens, institutional backing, and private investors. We are preparing for Series A at a stage where the product works, the customers are real, and the challenge is scaling the organization to match the demand.

Product and Engineering sit at the core of this company based out of our Aarhus headquarters, with a distributed development team in Cairo.

The Role

We are hiring a Product Owner to take full ownership of one or more of our core platform domains: Customer Management (CRM), Assets & Properties, or Route & Navigation.

These domains are the operational backbone for every customer we serve. When a city planner looks up a citizen's waste history, that is your domain. When a driver in the rain confirms a pickup on an iPad, that is your domain. When a Norwegian municipality prices 47 different waste fractions across 5 companies, that is your domain.

We are looking for a product person who makes decisions under uncertainty, communicates clearly with a distributed team, and treats every sprint as a bet that must pay off.

You will work in a Product Trio alongside a Tech Lead and a Product Designer, reporting to our Head of Product. You will have direct access to customers and leadership, and real authority over your domain.

What You Walk Into

We are honest about our stage. Here is what the role looks like in practice:

A platform in evolution. We are migrating our core product to a modern cloud-native architecture. You need to be comfortable working across legacy and new systems simultaneously and making smart prioritization calls about where to invest.

Customers with contractual commitments. We serve public institutions on multi-year contracts with fixed delivery schedules. Your roadmap is shaped by real obligations, not just product vision. You need to balance what customers need now with where the platform needs to go.

A growing organization, not a finished one. We recently restructured into domain-based product squads. Processes and rituals are being shaped, not inherited. You are building the playbook, not following it.

A distributed team. Your developers work across multiple locations and time zones. Clear communication and well-structured requirements are not nice-to-haves; they are how work gets done.

Modern tooling is actively evolving. We use AI-assisted workflows in our daily product and engineering processes. The toolchain is not static. You adapt and improve it.

Design capacity is scaling. We are hiring a Product Designer in parallel. Until then, you make UX calls, validate with customers, and keep momentum without waiting for pixel-perfect mockups.

Depending on your background and our alignment during interviews, your domain will be one or more of:

Customer Management CRM, agreements, case management, process automation. The central nervous system of every waste operator's daily work.

Assets & Properties: Containers, fleet, property register, inventory. The physical infrastructure layer that connects citizens to services.

Route & Navigation: Route optimization, driver app (Navigator), field UX. The operational layer where software meets asphalt, rain, and time pressure.

Across any domain, you own:

• Product discovery, customer interviews, data analysis, and hypothesis validation
• Prioritization, including kill-decisions on features that do not earn their place.
• Sprint facilitation, walk-the-board dailies, acceptance, stakeholder demos.
• Customer relationship direct contact with municipal planners, drivers, and enterprise delivery managers
• Bid support compliance matrices and feature-readiness assessments for active tenders.

What We Expect

Experience that transfers. 4–5+ years as Product Owner or Product Manager in B2B SaaS. You have worked with enterprise customers who have contractual obligations — not just startups searching for product-market fit. You have operated inside an organization you did not build yourself, influencing decisions across functions you do not control.

Two-persona thinking. Our platform serves fundamentally different users. A city planner at a desk needs data granularity, export capabilities, and advanced filtering. A truck driver in the rain needs 3 taps and zero friction on an iPad. You understand that we are not competing with other apps for the driver we are competing with the memory of a paper checklist. And we need to win.

Clarity under pressure. When a customer escalation lands mid-sprint, you do not panic-pivot the roadmap. You assess: does this validate what we are building, reveal a gap in our discovery, or belong in backlog triage You communicate the decision clearly and move on.

Regulatory awareness. Municipal customers operate under WCAG accessibility requirements, GDPR, and sector-specific compliance. You do not need to be a lawyer, but you need to understand that shipping a citizen portal without accessibility compliance puts a public customer at legal risk.

Scandinavian language skills. Our municipal customers in Denmark, Sweden, UK, Finland, and Norway communicate in Nordic languages. You need to be fluent in Danish, Norwegian, or Swedish to participate in customer dialogue at the level this role requires.

AI as a Working Method, Not a Buzzword

We use AI operationally across the entire company. This is not an experiment or an innovation lab. It is how we work. We expect you to:

Use AI daily to multiply your output. Requirements analysis, stakeholder communication, competitive research, and acceptance criteria you use Claude, Gemini, or equivalent as a core part of your workflow, not as an occasional helper.

Prototype and validate faster than traditional cycles allow. When a customer asks, Could the interface work like this, you can spin up a quick prototype in Lovable, v0.dev, or similar tools and get feedback the same week without waiting for a sprint.

Automate the repetitive parts of product ownership. Categorizing customer feedback, mapping feature requests against contract requirements, and generating test scenarios from user stories, you see these as automation opportunities, not manual tasks.

Evaluate AI output critically. In an enterprise context, a hallucinated requirement or an incorrect compliance assessment has contractual consequences. You know when AI output is good enough and when it needs human judgment.

We already use Claude-based agentic workflows for issue creation in Linear, code analysis, and bid compliance. You build on top of that foundation; you do not start from scratch.

How We Evaluate

We do not ask for certifications or frameworks. We test like this:

A real case. You receive a scenario based on an actual WasteHero challenge. We assess your triage logic, your ability to balance competing personas, and your prioritization under constrained resources. You may use AI during the case, we observe how.

A screen review. We show you a part of our platform and ask what you would change and why. No polished presentation required. We want to see your UX instinct in action.

Scenario questions. How do you handle a customer escalation mid-sprint How do you give ownership to a developer in Cairo How do you communicate a no to a customer with a multi-year contract

What You Get

Real ownership. Not proxy-PO, not backlog administration. You own a domain with direct customer contact and strategic influence on a platform serving millions of citizens.

A leadership team that moves fast. You report to a Head of Product who has been in the seat for 3 months and is actively building the product organization. The CEO is close to the product and makes decisions quickly. Short feedback loops, not committee governance.

AI-native tooling. An engineering organization that actively invests in AI-accelerated development workflows. You will work alongside a Head of AI Engineering and a Principal Engineer to shape how AI transforms product development.

The chance to shape processes. Squad structure, ways of working, discovery practices, tooling, all of it is being built right now. You are not executing someone else's playbook. You are writing it.

A mission that matters. Waste management is a critical infrastructure. What we build runs millions of collections, affects hundreds of thousands of citizens, and enables sustainable operations at the municipal scale. This is not ad-tech.