Sr. Product Manager – Warehouse Execution Systems (WES) & Automation

FORTNA partners with the world’s leading brands to transform omnichannel and parcel distribution operations. Known world-wide for enabling companies to keep pace with digital disruption and growth objectives, we design and deliver solutions, powered by intelligent software, to optimize fast, accurate and cost-effective order fulfillment and last mile delivery. Our people, innovative approach and proprietary algorithms and tools ensure optimal operations design and material and information flow. We deliver exceptional value every day to our customers with comprehensive services and products including network strategy, distribution center operational design and implementation, material handling automated equipment, robotics and a comprehensive suite of lifecycle services. At FORTNA, we believe in fostering a workplace that isn't just a job but a movement – a collective effort to redefine success and transform challenges into opportunities. "Join the Movement" encapsulates our commitment to a workplace culture that thrives on collaboration, celebrates diversity, and empowers every individual to contribute to something greater than themselves. Our Team. Our Passion. Our Approach.  The Senior Product Manager – Warehouse Execution Systems (WES) is responsible for defining, evolving, and delivering software capabilities that orchestrate work across complex automated distribution centers. This role requires strong domain knowledge of warehouse execution, inventory management, order and task orchestration, and warehouse automation . The Senior Product Manager must understand how orders, inventory, people, and automation interact across a distribution center and translate operational challenges into scalable product capabilities. This is a hands-on product role . The ideal candidate will work directly with customers, warehouse operations, Solution Design, Software Solution Architects, Engineering, Data Science, UX, QA, and Sales. They should be comfortable moving between customer conversations, warehouse-floor workflows, product strategy, detailed requirements, and development discussions. The Senior Product Manager is also expected to be an AI-enabled product leader , using modern AI tools to improve requirements quality, identify edge cases, reduce refinement cycles, and develop repeatable workflows or agents that improve Product team efficiency. Role and Responsibilities Product Strategy, Roadmap & Customer Engagement Own and contribute to the WES product roadmap, balancing strategic investments, customer requirements, technical improvements, and market opportunities. Engage directly with customers and warehouse operations teams to gather Voice of Customer, understand operational challenges, validate concepts, and demonstrate product capabilities. Participate in pre-sales, Solution Design, customer workshops, testing, and warehouse visits. Evaluate requirements based on customer value, operational impact, technical feasibility, development effort, and applicability across customers. Identify opportunities to convert customer-specific requirements into configurable and reusable product capabilities. Maintain a clear distinction between base product functionality and customer-specific customization. Communicate WES capabilities and product direction effectively to technical, operational, commercial, and executive stakeholders. WES Product Definition & Execution Define capabilities across receiving, decant, inventory, storage, replenishment, allocation, picking, consolidation, packing, shipping, and exception management. Understand and define how WES should prioritize, release, route, sequence, and balance work across automated and manual areas of a distribution center. Maintain strong knowledge of inventory concepts including handling units, locations, inventory states, reservations, allocation, replenishment, cycle counting, and inventory movements. Understand how WES interacts with WMS, WCS, PLC/Controls, ASRS, AutoStore, AMRs/AGVs, robotics, conveyors, sortation, GTP, and packing systems. Translate operational requirements into clear features, epics, workflows, and implementation-ready user stories. Ensure requirements include appropriate business rules, acceptance criteria, configurations, UI behavior, integrations, payloads, exception handling, and expected system behavior. Work closely with Engineering and Architecture to understand technical implications, integration dependencies, and design trade-offs. Partner with Data Science where algorithms or optimization are used for allocation, replenishment, work release, routing, prioritization, or resource balancing. Maintain a well-refined backlog and actively participate in refinement, sprint reviews, PI/release planning, and other Agile ceremonies. Quality, Validation & AI-Enabled Product Management Own product quality throughout the development lifecycle and validate delivered functionality against the intended operational outcome. Ensure requirements and test scenarios consider positive, negative, edge, exception, concurrency, integration failure, and recovery conditions where applicable. Use AI tools to challenge requirements and identify missing scenarios, ambiguous requirements, dependencies, downstream impacts, and potential implementation gaps before stories reach Development. Use AI-assisted quality checks to ensure stories contain enough functional and technical context to minimize repeated clarification between Product/BA and Development. Develop reusable AI prompts, workflows, or agents for requirements analysis, story quality, documentation, test scenario generation, impact analysis, and product knowledge retrieval. Explore integration of AI with Jira, Confluence, product documentation, SRS documents, test cases, and other knowledge sources. Ensure AI-generated output is reviewed and validated by accountable Product team members; AI should improve product judgment, not replace it. Use lear