Head of Product Business Unit

Anchanto | Pune, India | Reports to the Chief Executive Officer | Unit of 12 to 45 people

ABOUT ANCHANTO

Anchanto is an e-commerce and supply chain technology company headquartered in Singapore, with offices in twelve countries across Asia Pacific, the Middle East and Europe and its largest engineering center in Pune. Brands, retailers and logistics service providers use our purpose built SaaS products to run and scale their e-commerce and omnichannel operations: Order Management, Warehouse Management, Anchanto Grid with more than 200 ready integrations to marketplaces, carriers and enterprise systems, Parcel Tracking, Control Tower and Operations Experience, with Vantage AI as the data and insights layer across all of them.

Our AI enabled agentic services, launching soon, help customers run their commerce operations with less manual work and faster decisions. More than 360 enterprise customers, including L'Oréal, Panasonic, Estée Lauder, DKSH, Toll and Bosch, process over 200 million orders a year through Anchanto across more than 700 warehouses. Anchanto is an Asendia portfolio company.

THE ROLE

A Product Business Unit (PBU) is Product Management and Engineering for one product, brought together as a single threaded organization with one head, one backlog and one set of priorities. The head owns the product's market position, strategy, roadmap, engineering, quality, reliability and business results, and leads the engineers who build it. This is how the leading software companies are organized today: Amazon's single threaded leaders and two pizza teams, the autonomous product units at Spotify and Atlassian, the product clouds at Salesforce and Adobe each run as a business.

It removes the handoffs, competing priorities and diffused accountability of separate product and engineering functions, and puts one leader in charge who decides and answers for the result.

This is not a pure product management role. You lead the engineering team as well as the product team, you own the technical quality of what ships, and you are measured on outcomes, not activities. It is the role of building a product business that leads its category: you set where the product goes, build it with your own engineering team, put it in front of the market with the revenue teams, and answer for what it earns and how customers experience it.

WHAT YOU OWN: PRODUCT STRATEGY, ROADMAP, ENGINEERING, DECISIONS AND RESULTS

Product strategy. You know your market and competitors better than anyone in the company, set the product strategy and the positioning ambition with the industry research leaders, keep the product's gaps against the Gartner, Forrester and IDC criteria on your roadmap with dates, and give the CROs your input on pricing and packaging.

Roadmap and priorities. One backlog covering the roadmap, customer commitments, innovation and tech debt, with the trade offs made by you within the portfolio allocation the CEO sets. Customer priorities and asks come to you from the Delivery team, your internal customer; you deliver against them and do not overwrite them.

Decisions. What gets built, in what order and how; technical design within the architecture and security standards the CTO sets; release decisions; and whether your product can meet a scope and a date. No scope or date is committed on your product without your confirmation, and once committed you deliver it.

The way we build. Specs based, AI assisted engineering is the standard way of working in every unit. You own the spec standard for your product and the readiness gate that stops work starting before decisions, credentials and test windows are in place. Quality is owned by the people who build.

Results. Product P&L, growth, margin and contribution; reliability, incident response and customer satisfaction for your product; and the people: unit structure, hiring, promotions and a standing innovation and AI sub pod that explores adjacent capabilities.

Ecosystem. Alignment with the other PBUs on the shared roadmap, the blueprint and joint commitments, and working in step with Product Marketing.

COMMERCIAL INVOLVEMENT

This is not a sales role and carries no quota. The CROs set market priorities, the go to market and what and how your product is sold; the revenue teams (existing customers, Global Strategic Accounts, Key Account Management) own the customer connect. You help them sell: you step into strategic, complex or at risk deals when asked, and you are the final word on what your product can commit to and when. You do not override or bypass them to reach customers directly.

HOW YOU MANAGE YOUR PEOPLE

Every person in the unit has written objectives and two or three KPIs for the quarter, reviewed monthly; nobody is without them thirty days after joining.

Feedback is direct, factual and given within the week, in writing when it matters.

You represent the company to your team, not the team to the company. Management debt, wrong decisions, undelivered feedback and unaddressed interpersonal issues, is fixed within thirty days of knowing about it.

Performance is measured against objectives, not effort or tenure. An underperformer gets a written plan and a date; if it passes you take the decision yourself, including exit. Interns are confirmed and people are promoted only after a documented assessment and a direct conversation.

The unit reports in numbers, weekly in writing and monthly in the outcome review.

You talk to your N-1, your N-2 and every individual contributor, with skip level one to ones at least quarterly; you do the final interview of every person joining the unit; and the unit runs on a written meeting cadence you publish in your first thirty days and keep.

OWNING CUSTOMER ESCALATIONS

An escalation on your product is yours from the moment it is raised until the customer confirms it is closed. You do not trivialize it, and you do not expect the CEO or the CROs to lead it. You own the fix and the communication: first written update within the hour, a fixed written cadence until closed, root cause and corrective action within five working days after. You put proactive monitoring in place so the unit knows before the customer does.

WHO DECIDES WHAT

• Decision: Roadmap, prioritization, trade offs, what gets built and how, technical design within architecture guardrails, release decisions within standards.
• Decides: You
• Decision: Whether your product can meet a scope and a date; unit structure, hiring and promotions within policy; spend within the approved budget.
• Decides: You
• Decision: Customer priority, customer asks, revenue delivery and the external customer commitment and timeline.
• Decides: Delivery, with your confirmation on scope and date
• Decision: Pricing and packaging; market priorities; go to market; what and how your product is sold; customer connect.
• Decides: CROs and revenue teams, with your input on pricing
• Decision: Portfolio allocation, the blueprint, headcount and total investment, cross PBU priority collisions.
• Decides: CEO
• Decision: Technology standards, security and compliance, architecture guardrails, CICD, infrastructure, data and AI platform.
• Decides: CTO

HOW YOU ARE MEASURED

You own outcomes, not activities. Story points, releases and features shipped are not on this scorecard. You are judged on the outputs below, and you run the unit on five to eight controllable input metrics that you propose, prove move the outputs, and review every week. Numbers are baselined in your first month and verified by Finance.

Product led revenue enablement

What we look at: Adoption and usage depth of the modules we sell, share of customers on the current version, deals unblocked or lost on product capability, referenceable customers, time to go live

Retention and unit margin

What we look at: Net revenue retention for your product, churn and its reasons, and the unit's contribution margin after people, infrastructure and delivery cost

Reliability and customer satisfaction

What we look at: Availability, incidents and time to resolve, escaped defects, escalations by count, root cause and time to close, NPS or CSAT, and whether the unit found the problem before the customer did

Planned versus actual

What we look at: Execution against the quarterly plan and the annual plan: objectives met, committed deliveries on date, say to do ratio, and variances explained in writing

Market position

What we look at: Where the product stands against the Forrester Wave, Gartner Magic Quadrant and IDC MarketScape criteria for its category, gaps closed each quarter, and analyst recognition over time

AI leverage and AI first approach

What we look at: Share of work built specs based and AI assisted, automation percentage by activity, cost and cycle time per delivered item falling every quarter, new work designed AI first

Team EPS and health

What we look at: Team EPS score, attrition and regretted attrition, skills coverage, and whether the unit runs without you in the room

PLANNING AND CADENCE

You write the multi year product plan, the annual plan each October as a six page narrative with targets and resource scenarios, and, four weeks before each quarter, a ninety day plan derived from both, presented to and aligned with the leadership team; execution is measured against it. Weekly unit review on the inputs in writing, monthly outcome review with the CEO, quarterly review on the two or three CEO goals for your unit.

SKILLS AND PRIOR EXPERIENCE

Must haves for every candidate. Candidates without all of these will not be shortlisted.

At least fifteen years of industry experience, with at least five of them running a product, product line, business unit or operation with accountability for its results.

Global experience. Has worked in, and built or run operations outside India, with customers or teams in more than one country. India only experience does not qualify.

Education. Engineering from IIT or NIT, or an MBA from IIM or a top ranked global business school.

Domain. Commerce, logistics, supply chain or marketplace software, or the operations they serve, with enterprise customers.

Decides and manages directly. Makes the call quickly, takes the trade off and answers for the outcome. Has set objectives for every person, given hard feedback in time, taken exit decisions personally and owned the communication in a customer crisis. Comfortable making AI assisted, specs driven engineering the default way of working.

Career paths we are open to. The role needs product, technology and business skills together; nobody arrives with all three at the same depth, so we hire from four paths and test for the second skill in each.

Technology leader with product skills. Director of Engineering, CTO, CIO or equivalent, with deep experience in building, releasing and commercializing software systems, who has also owned a roadmap, met the market and made product trade offs, not only delivered what product handed over.

Product management leader with technology depth. Head of Product Management or commercial product management in B2B SaaS, with technology skills to a good extent: has led or closely directed engineering teams, can hold an architecture review, and has shipped and commercialized what they defined.

Operations practitioner from a large 3PL, retailer or brand. Has run e-commerce, fulfilment or supply chain operations as a business at scale, with deep domain knowledge of how the work is actually done, and has specified, bought or built the systems behind it well enough to direct a product team.

Consultant or transformation leader. Head of consulting, transformation or a consulting practice in commerce or supply chain, with deep consulting and domain expertise, who has delivered systems and operating models for clients end to end rather than advised from the side.

In every path the second skill must be shown with specific examples. This role is not a Head of Engineering with a product manager reporting in, a delivery manager promoted up, a product leader who hands execution to someone else, a second sales channel to the customer, or a union leader for the team. Compensation: fixed salary, variable pay tied to the scorecard, and long term incentives; details shared with shortlisted candidates.

Benefits

• Global Exposure: Work with diverse teams, customers and stakeholders across international markets and gain experience in a global B2B SaaS environment.
• Learning & Development: We invest in our people through sponsored learning, certifications and development opportunities aligned with your professional growth.
• International & Onsite Opportunities: Client-facing roles may offer opportunities to travel and work onsite with customers across our global markets.
• Medical Insurance: Comprehensive medical insurance coverage to support to you and your family health and well-being.
• Comprehensive Leave Benefits: Maternity, Paternity, Marriage and Bereavement leave, along with Comp Off and flexibility to support important personal commitments.
• Recognition for Long-Term Contribution: Tenured employees are eligible for additional monetary benefits, extra paid leave and company-sponsored paid vacations as part of our commitment to recognising long-term contribution.
• Flexibility & Work-Life Balance: A supportive and flexible work environment that enables employees to manage professional responsibilities alongside personal priorities.
• Meaningful Career Growth: Take ownership of challenging, high-impact work and contribute to products and solutions that serve global brands, retailers and logistics businesses.