Principal Product Leader (Onsite)

Job Location: Kaiseraugst, Switzerland 

Type of Engagement: Contract

Modus Create is a digital consulting partner that helps ambitious organizations design, build, and modernize digital products, platforms, and AI-powered experiences. We work shoulder-to-shoulder with client teams to move from idea to production quickly and sustainably, with a clear path to scale.

Our teams bring product leadership, experience design, architecture, engineering, quality, and delivery expertise together in integrated pods. We partner close to the business, create clarity in complex environments, and focus on measurable outcomes, not just deliverables.

At Modus, Product Leadership exists to turn intent into outcomes. We create clarity in complexity, make tradeoffs explicit, guide teams toward measurable adoption and business impact, and help clients make better decisions as delivery moves forward.

We are looking for a Principal Product Leader who can bring product, project, and business analysis strengths together in a client-facing delivery environment.

This is not a traditional product manager role and it is not a traditional project manager role. This role requires a leader who can translate business intent into clear priorities, buildable requirements, delivery rhythm, stakeholder alignment, and adoption-minded outcomes.

You will be embedded with a client team as a trusted delivery partner. You will help an agile team operate effectively inside a broader environment that may be waterfall, phase-gated, governance-heavy, or politically complex. You will create the connective tissue between business stakeholders, technology teams, experience design, quality, delivery leadership, and client decision makers.

In this role, you will:

• Lead product delivery from intent to adoption, not just from backlog to deployment.
•  Translate client goals, constraints, and business context into clear product direction, buildable requirements, and measurable delivery plans.
•  Run or support agile delivery rhythms, including sprint planning, backlog refinement, daily standups, demos, retrospectives, and decision forums.
• Create bridges between client planning cycles, governance expectations, and iterative team delivery.
• Own backlog readiness, story decomposition, acceptance intent, requirements quality, and delivery traceability.
•  Help teams decompose work into practical increments that allow for learning, adaptation, and visible progress.
• Facilitate stakeholder alignment, clarify decision rights, document tradeoffs, and move conversations from ambiguity to action.
•  Communicate status, risks, dependencies, scope decisions, and escalations clearly and proactively.
•  Navigate competing priorities and political dynamics with maturity, discretion, and sound judgment.
•  Define what success looks like before delivery begins, including adoption signals, leading indicators, release readiness, and business impact measures.

Success in this role means the client and team experience more clarity, stronger decision flow, better delivery rhythm, and greater confidence in what is being built.

• Experience leading agile delivery teams in a client-facing consulting, agency, professional services, enterprise, or complex internal environment.
• Experience operating in or around waterfall, phase-gated, regulated, or governance-heavy environments while helping teams work iteratively.
•  Strong product delivery experience, including backlog management, story decomposition, requirements quality, prioritization, release planning, and acceptance criteria.
•  Strong project leadership skills, including dependency management, risk management, stakeholder communication, delivery cadence, and escalation framing.
•  Strong business analysis instincts, including process clarity, requirement hierarchy, acceptance intent, and specification quality.
• Ability to connect roadmap, delivery, rollout, and adoption across larger scopes of work.
• Ability to shape sequencing, scope, and tradeoffs using cost, opportunity, risk, and return.
• Ability to use data, user insights, and business context to shape recommendations, guide tradeoffs, and drive measurable outcomes.
• Ability to get smart quickly on client context, business process, users, constraints, and market dynamics.
• Ability to facilitate productive conversations with senior stakeholders, business partners, product owners, engineering teams, experience design, QA, and delivery leadership.
• Ability to make tradeoffs explicit and help stakeholders move from discussion to decision.
• Ability to navigate ambiguous or political client environments with calm, maturity, and discretion.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, especially status reporting, risk framing, decision documentation, and executive-ready updates.
•  A collaborative, proactive, and friendly client presence with the judgment to know when to listen, when to structure, and when to push.

• Consulting experience or experience working directly with external clients.
• Experience supporting digital product builds, modernization efforts, enterprise platforms, or custom software delivery.
•  Experience with Jira, Azure DevOps, Confluence, Miro, Figma, or similar product and delivery collaboration tools.
• Experience working with distributed teams across multiple time zones.
• Experience defining adoption metrics, leading indicators, release readiness criteria, or post-release feedback loops.
• Experience with process mapping, stakeholder mapping, decision logs, risk narratives, executive readouts, or delivery operating models.
• Experience helping a team move from broad or unclear requirements into a structured backlog tied to outcomes, features, epics, stories, and acceptance criteria.
•  Experience improving delivery flow in environments with complex governance, handoffs, dependencies, or competing stakeholder priorities.
•   Experience using AI-enabled tools to improve discovery, analysis, requirements clarity, documentation, delivery flow, or decision support.

• You like being the connective tissue across product, project, business analysis, delivery, and client leadership.
• You are comfortable leading through ambiguity without pretending everything is clear too early
• You can run the room without needing to dominate it.
• You are friendly and collaborative, but not passive.
• You are proactive without creating unnecessary noise.
• You can read the room, spot unspoken constraints, and adapt your communication style to move work forward.
• You enjoy creating structure, decision flow, and delivery rhythm in environments that need both discipline and tact.
• You believe strong requirements, clear tradeoffs, and steady delivery cadence are what allow teams to move faster with confidence.
• You care about adoption, usage, and business impact, not just shipped scope.

Deployment is not the finish line. Adoption is.

By joining our team, you’ll be part of a winning squad that plays to each other’s strengths and celebrates every success together.