Founding Product Manager, AI Legal-Tech Agent (Paris)

Founding Product Manager, AI Legal-Tech Agent (Paris)

400 notary offices, 20,000 transactions a month, over €2M ARR, six engineers, and nobody in product.

The co-founder writes specs between two meetings.

You come in to turn product into a real discipline.

Ideally, you learned the craft at a leading product-led scale-up.

• Product Management
• Specs & Discovery
• Post Hog
• Agents IA / LLM
• B2B Saa S
• Legal-Tech
• The company

Our client is building the AI colleague for French notaries.

The product lives inside Outlook and Word, where notaries already work: it reads the emails on a case file, drafts the replies, fetches missing documents from a dozen public and partner registries, extracts the legally relevant facts and flags what needs a human.

More than 400 notary offices use it. Over 20,000 transactions go through the product every month. ARR has passed €2M. Six engineers, and not a single person in product yet.

The product covers the whole asset-transfer chain: collecting and interpreting administrative documents, drafting deeds, filing with the land registry.

The goal is €4M ARR by year end and €20M within two years.

The engineering team went from three to six engineers in two months.

Users are demanding professionals working on legal deeds where mistakes are not an option: reliability is as much a product topic as a technical one.

Why this role exists

Today, the co-founder IS the product function.

He writes the specs, ranks the backlog, decides what ships, talks to notaries and chases what happened after a release went out.

He does all five, and does each of them about half as well as they deserve.

The result is predictable: specs that are too thin, engineers who build the wrong thing or stop to ask a question, priorities that move because he moved them, and features that ship without anyone checking they do what was asked.

The loop almost never closes: it ships, and nobody measures whether it changed anything.

You are here to make product a discipline in its own right, instead of something a founder does between two other things.

• What you own
• Specs engineers can build from without tracking down the founder.

Problem, expected behaviour, edge cases, definition of done.

Written.

It is the highest-leverage item on this list, and it starts in week one.

• The backlog and the mechanics around it.

The team runs on Linear, with 80% of capacity allocated to cycles and 20% to an interrupt lane.

The tooling is good, the discipline is irregular.

You own the ranking, the grooming, and saying no to the founder when he reshuffles the deck.

• Acceptance. Nothing reaches a notary because a ticket was dragged into "Done". You check in the product that it actually does the thing, before it counts.
• Closing the loop.

What shipped, for whom, and whether it moved anything.

Post Hog for behaviour, Productlane for what customers say.

Using them to answer "did it work?" is on you.

• Discovery. You talk to notaries directly, not through the founder, not through a summary. You come back with problems he had not seen and a view on which ones matter.
• What the founder keeps, and what comes next

Today he keeps the roadmap and the strategic direction.

He also wants to build a company that runs without him, and would rather grow someone ambitious than manage someone comfortable.

So the scope grows with trust: the more operational work you take off his plate by doing it better than he does, the more of the strategic half he hands over.

• Who this is for
• Ideally, you have been a PM at a leading product-led scale-up (fintech, insurtech, Saa S: think N26, Qonto, Alan, Pennylane...).

You kept the reflexes: discovery that never stops, decisions made on data, short iterations, and the habit of killing what does not work.

• You have done product in a small B2B Saa S company where the process did not exist yet.

Not inherited a set of rituals and ceremonies: built one from scratch, and kept it light enough that people actually use it.

• You write specs people actually read.

You can take a fuzzy problem in a complicated domain and turn it into something an engineer picks up without a meeting.

Ambiguity is something you remove, not something you pass on.

• You go to the source. You will be on video calls with notaries, in the support tickets, watching someone misuse the product without explaining how they should use it.
• You have judgment on what not to build. The constraint here is not a lack of ideas: you will spend more time killing and sequencing than generating.
• You are comfortable close to the material.

Today the founder specifies and the frontend engineer produces a v0 mock-up; that loop works and can continue with you in his place.

Being able to get your hands in and iterate on those mock-ups is a bonus, not a filter: this is not a design role, and there is no designer.

• Fluent French. Users are exclusively French-speaking and you will be in front of them constantly. The team itself works in English.
• What already exists, honestly
• Linear for planning, with a gates model and a Plan / Ship split
• Post Hog for product analytics and feature flags
• Productlane for customer feedback, support and the help centre
• A weekly voice-of-customer routine and a two-person CS team
• Six engineers across backend, LLM and frontend
• No designer, no other PM, no product ops

And what is not working yet: everything above runs at the quality of a founder doing it in the gaps.

Cycles are planned in a rush, urgent requests disrupt the roadmap too often, dependencies are poorly anticipated, and feedback is collected more reliably than it is processed.

You are not walking into a machine that needs tuning: you are walking into a set of good tools nobody has had time to use properly.

• The first 90 days
• Day 30: you have spoken to at least fifteen notaries and can teach the founder something about his users he did not know.

The specs for the current cycle are yours and he has stopped writing them.

• Day 60: the backlog has a ranking that survives contact with the founder.

Acceptance happens before anything reaches a customer, and you both know what your real release cadence is.

• Day 90: you can answer with evidence "did the last three things we shipped work?", and the founder spends his product time on direction rather than on what is in flight.
• Terms and process
• Permanent contract, Paris, hybrid: 2 to 3 days a week in the office.

This rhythm is firm, there is no fully remote version of this role, and the office is in central Paris. €80K to €100K base salary, plus BSPCE (equity).

Start as soon as you are available.

• 45 minutes with the co-founder, then a written product case on a real company problem and 60 minutes taking it apart together, then a conversation with two engineers from the team, then a founders' conversation and reference checks.
• The stated goal is three weeks from first call to offer.
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