Head of Strategy & Product in London, England at Squid

About Squid (www.squid.energy)

AI and data centres are booming, electrification is accelerating, and trillions in generation, storage, and connection projects are queued - but the real bottleneck is the grid.

Grid planning and operations are becoming a national-scale systems problem: complex network models, messy legacy data, strict governance, overloaded teams, and high-stakes decisions that affect real infrastructure.

Squid is building the agentic modelling platform for power grids: a versioned, auditable source of truth where network models, data, changes, assumptions, and decisions can be tracked - and where humans and AI agents can safely work together.

We unify legacy planning models, operational data, and grid workflows into software that helps teams run checks, compare models, explain changes, validate assumptions, and move faster without losing engineering rigour.

Based in London, Squid is backed by premier investors like Y Combinator and partners with industry leaders including National Grid and Northern Powergrid. 🦑

About the role

Pay Range: £75k-£200k (salary + equity), based in London, UK.

We are hiring a Head of Strategy & Product to own how Squid decides where to play, what to build and how to commercialise it.

You will work closely with the CEO and CTO to convert market and customer evidence into clear company, product and commercial choices. The role spans customer and workflow focus, product strategy, discovery, value propositions, pricing, pilot design, roadmap development and selected longer-term opportunities.

This is not a purely advisory strategy role. You will be directly accountable for turning analysis into shipped products, customer outcomes and commercial results.

This is a high-ownership role based in our central London office, with the opportunity to shape Squid’s company strategy and product direction from an early stage.

What you'll do

• Define and refine Squid’s initial ideal customer profile, buyer, champion, user and first repeatable workflow.
• Evaluate market structure, competition, international sequencing and adjacent opportunities.
• Turn analysis into explicit choices about what Squid should do now, next and not now.
• Build a continuous customer discovery programme and conduct interviews with utility executives, domain experts and users.
• Synthesise evidence across accounts and distinguish repeatable demand from bespoke customer requests.
• Frame hypotheses, experiments and evidence thresholds that allow Squid to continue, change or stop a bet.
• Own product strategy and roadmap with the CTO, including outcomes, sequencing and measures of value.
• Decide what belongs in the core platform, a reusable workflow, an integration, implementation work or the backlog.
• Ensure strategic deployments strengthen reusable product assets and Squid’s shared modelling and governance layer.
• Define value propositions and quantified business cases for priority customers and buyers.
• Design paid pilots, success criteria, packaging, pricing and conversion paths.
• Shape proposals, demonstrations and sales narratives, and support the CEO on strategic deals and expansion.
• Test new product and market opportunities through bounded experiments before significant engineering investment.

Qualifications

You do not need to meet every requirement. We are looking for someone who combines rigorous strategic thinking with direct product and commercial execution.

You may be a strong fit if you have:

• Experience in strategy consulting followed by product or venture building, zero-to-one enterprise product leadership, or founding and operating a technical company.
• A record of turning ambiguous customer and market questions into clear product and commercial decisions.
• Direct experience personally shipping, launching or commercialising a product.
• Strong understanding of enterprise buyers, procurement processes and the difference between user interest and available budget.
• Confidence working with pricing, business cases, market analysis and product metrics.
• Technical fluency sufficient to work closely with engineers and sophisticated domain users.
• Clear, structured writing and the judgement to challenge assumptions without slowing execution.
• A willingness to remain involved in implementation rather than operating only as an adviser.
• Experience in utilities, infrastructure or regulated enterprise software would be valuable, but is not required.