Strategic Partnerships Manager Jobs in North Carolina

Job Title: Product Manager (Offering Manager – IOI / New Product Development)

Job Description:

Trystar is at the forefront of advancing power solutions, charged and driven by a committed, dynamic team, tackling complex challenges, and creating innovative solutions. We’re looking for motivated, driven, and talented individuals eager to be part of the future of power. Safety and integrity aren’t just buzzwords, they are the north star guiding us as we aspire to wow our customers every day. We’ve created power solutions that are not only durable and unique but are also the result of exciting teamwork from every corner of our organization.

Individually and collectively, every team member at Trystar plays for each other and strives to deliver unmatched value and 100% accuracy to our customers every single day. Our cutting-edge headquarters is in Faribault, MN, a facility that is partially solar and wind powered by our own microgrid! Together, we are Trystar, where we power the future and nurture innovation for a brighter tomorrow.

Trystar’s team members are our most important asset, and we expect this position to play a critical role in achieving our strategic objectives. We seek an Offering Manager – IOI to lead our new offering development agenda — identifying where the market is heading, validating which opportunities are real, and ensuring Trystar's innovation investment is pointed at solutions customers will buy and Trystar can win.

If you have taken ambiguous market opportunities and turned them into funded, commercial programs — with the business cases, customer evidence, and cross-functional alignment to back them up — this role is for you.

The OM – IOI owns the front end of Trystar's innovation pipeline — from opportunity identification through validated commercial handoff. This role sets the requirements for where Trystar invests in new solutions, collaborating with our engineering teams to deliver solutions with speed, and ensures that our technology investments are concentrated on opportunities with validated market demand and achievable returns. While our Engineering teams own technical execution; this role owns strategic direction, investment prioritization, and commercial readiness. Working most closely with R&D Engineering, Application Engineering, Marcom and Commercial Strategy, this role is the engine of Trystar’s vitality index.

• Opportunity Pipeline: Build and maintain a disciplined pipeline of new offering opportunities, prioritized by market size, strategic fit, competitive differentiation, and feasibility within Trystar’s capability base.
• Investment Cases: Develop investment-grade business cases — market validation, customer evidence, competitive landscape, financial modeling, and build/partner/buy analysis — that drive confident go/no-go decisions.
• Stage-Gate Governance: Own the stage-gate framework that advances programs from concept to pilot to commercial launch, ensuring appropriate validation at each stage and clear accountability for outcomes.
• Commercial Handoff: Define the readiness requirements for new solutions transitioning to OM-Commercial/Demand ownership, ensuring positioning, pricing inputs, and sales enablement are in place before launch.

Key Outcomes:

• Vitality index: percentage of revenue from solutions introduced within the last 24 months
• Innovation pipeline value: total addressable revenue of programs in active development
• Business case realization: percentage of forecasted Year 0 revenue achieved at commercial launch

We are looking for people who believe in our guiding principles and values of:

• Safety – We believe everyone should leave Trystar facilities in the same or better condition than when they arrived.
• Integrity – We’re honest, transparent, and committed to doing what’s right.
• Customer focus – We have relentless focus on our customers and their success.
• Right with speed – We use good judgement, make thoughtful decisions quickly, and execute them with purpose and intensity.
• Play for each other – We’re a team. We show up for each other and we know that through teamwork we achieve greatness.
• Champion change – We know adaptation and improvement are requirements to survive and to thrive.
• Enjoy the journey – We create an environment where our team feels appreciated and has fun along the way.

In this role you will get to:

Opportunity Identification & Market Validation:

• Lead market discovery across priority verticals and emerging application spaces — data centers, industrial, commercial, utility, and healthcare — to identify unmet needs and whitespace opportunities.
• Direct structured customer discovery efforts through Principal Advisors, Application Engineering, and Sales — validating problem severity, buying intent, and solution requirements before IOI investment is committed.
• Work with Commercial Strategy to translate market intelligence, technology trends, and competitive gap analysis into investable opportunity hypotheses with clear right-to-win rationale.
• Evaluate M&A targets and partnership opportunities as inputs to the IOI pipeline, providing structured assessments that inform acquisition screening and strategic partnership decisions.

Investment Prioritization & Stage-Gate Governance:

• Develop investment-grade business cases for priority IOI opportunities, covering market sizing, customer validation, financial projections, technical feasibility, and build/partner/buy recommendations.
• Lead IOI prioritization with Solutions Leadership, RDE, and Application Engineering — ensuring investment is focused on opportunities with the highest strategic and commercial return.
• Deliver new program pitches for IOI proposals — developing executive-ready presentations that frame the opportunity, the investment ask, and the expected return.

Commercial Readiness & Transition:

• Define commercial readiness requirements for new solutions transitioning from IOI to OM-Commercial/Demand — validated positioning, pricing architecture inputs, sales enablement tools, and operational readiness criteria.
• Partner with OM-Commercial/Demand on initial demand creation and launch planning, ensuring market entry is sequenced with validated customer evidence and committed early adopters.
• Institutionalize lessons from programs that did not advance — ensuring failed bets generate organizational intelligence rather than silent write-offs.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in product management, innovation management, new business development, or offering development in a B2B industrial, electrical, or technology-intensive business.
• Demonstrated track record of identifying, validating, and commercializing new solution offerings that generated measurable revenue impact.
• Strong market research and customer discovery skills — able to conduct VOC, synthesize qualitative and quantitative data, and build investment-grade business cases from primary research.
• Experience with agile, scrum, stage-gate or phase-gate new offering development processes with accountability for program governance and cross-functional coordination.
• Financial modeling capability — market sizing, P&L projection, and investment return analyses that withstand executive scrutiny.
• Comfort operating under significant ambiguity where neither the problem nor the solution is fully defined — requiring intellectual resilience and fast, iterative thinking.
• Proven ability to integrate AI tools (e.g., Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot) into core workflows— research, modeling, communications, synthesis — with demonstrated examples of how AI accelerated output quality or speed.
• Monthly travel required for candidates not based in Minnesota.

Preferred skills:

• Experience in electrical power systems, energy transition, industrial automation, or adjacent technology-intensive markets with direct involvement in launching new solution offerings.
• Technical depth in power electronics, digital/software systems, energy storage, or related fields sufficient to engage credibly with RDE and Application Engineering teams.
• Experience evaluating technology acquisition targets or strategic partnerships as inputs to a new offering pipeline.
• Bachelor’s degree in Engineering or a technical discipline strongly preferred. MBA or equivalent commercial training a plus.