Readiness stopped being paperwork

Armed forces spend almost all of their existence preparing for a day they hope never comes. Readiness is the whole of that work — how forces are trained, how that training is planned across years and budgets, how performance is assessed, and whether anyone can demonstrate, with evidence rather than assertion, that a unit can do what is being asked of it.

For a generation, much of Europe treated this as an administrative exercise. It is not one now. The institutions we serve are rebuilding readiness at a pace and scale they have not attempted in decades, and they are being asked to prove it as they go.

Exonaut is the platform they do it on.

Why this is a hard product job

The work is not difficult because the screens are complicated. It is difficult because of what the evidence has to survive.

A readiness assessment written today may be read years from now by someone deciding whether a unit is fit to deploy, or by an auditor asking how a conclusion was reached. It has to hold up. That means information with structure and provenance rather than a document anyone can quietly overwrite, systems that pass security review before they are allowed anywhere near a network, and working alongside the tools an institution already runs and has no intention of abandoning.

It also means respecting how these institutions actually work. They have doctrine, terminology and processes established long before we arrived, and they will not reshape them to suit a piece of software. Yet a platform that bends to every customer in turn stops being a platform at all.

That tension is the job: what belongs in the core, what stays configurable, and what we decline to build. Get those calls right and the platform compounds. Get them wrong and it becomes a very expensive spreadsheet.

The role

You will own a product area outright, as a senior individual contributor — the judgement, the strategy and the outcome, not a backlog to administer.

Which area you take on is settled with you, once we understand where your strengths land. We would rather match a strong product manager to the right problem than hire against a box we wrote before we met you.

Day to day:

• Work with the people who use it: planners, analysts and officers who have to prepare forces and be able to prove they are ready
• Turn a complex, institutional problem space into a strategy people can act on
• Work as co-owner with engineering and design, from discovery through delivery to measured outcome
• Decide what not to build, and defend that decision with evidence
• Weigh national and institutional variation against a coherent product: what generalises, what stays configurable, and what is one customer's problem alone

What we are looking for

• Product management at senior level — you own the strategy for an area, not features within someone else's, and you have been doing it long enough to have lived with the results
• A track record spanning discovery to delivery — you have found problems, not only shipped solutions
• Comfort with complex, regulated, slow-moving customers, and the patience that requires
• Structured thinking about metrics and evidence, paired with genuine qualitative insight
• Influence without authority across engineering, design, delivery and commercial
• Swedish citizenship (see below)
• Professional English, written and spoken — English is our working language

Merits, not requirements:

• Military service, or experience from the armed forces, a defence agency or the defence industry
• Swedish language
• Experience in another domain where procurement is slow, accreditation matters and buyers are institutions rather than individuals

Domain knowledge can be learned. Product judgement is harder to teach, so that is what we weight most heavily.

Security and citizenship

Because of the customers we serve, this role requires Swedish citizenship. Holding another citizenship in addition is not a barrier.

The role is subject to a security check before you start, and we take up ordinary employment references. We will explain exactly what that involves early in the process — nothing about it should surprise you late on.

How we hire

We publish our process, because a good interview should not be a surprise. You will meet:

1. Hiring manager screen
2. Product sense and strategy
3. Execution and delivery
4. Collaboration and influence
5. Analytical acumen
6. Culture interview
7. Your questions — time set aside for you to interrogate us

Every interview has a written script and a scored rubric, applied the same way for every candidate. We tell you what each session covers before it happens.

Practicalities

Stockholm-based and hybrid: we expect office presence, with flexibility around it. Permanent, full-time.

Apply with your CV and a short note on one product decision you got right and one you got wrong.