Vice President of Product Management and Development

Vice President of Product Management & Development
Location: United States | Full-Time | Remote / Hybrid / On-site
Reports To: Chief Executive Officer / Chief Operating Officer
The Opportunity
The Vice President of Product Management & Development is responsible for determining what the organization builds, why it matters to customers, and how product concepts move from discovery to launch and ongoing improvement. This executive connects customer needs, commercial objectives, technical feasibility, and development capacity to create products that deliver measurable business value.
The VP oversees the product lifecycle, from opportunity assessment and portfolio planning through requirements definition, development coordination, release readiness, and performance evaluation. The role requires strong commercial judgment, disciplined prioritization, and the ability to align product, engineering, marketing, sales, and operations around shared outcomes.
Product Portfolio and Investment Decisions
The VP will maintain a clear view of the product portfolio and ensure development resources are directed toward the most valuable opportunities.
Evaluate proposed products, features, enhancements, and technical initiatives against customer demand, strategic alignment, revenue potential, delivery cost, and implementation risk.
Establish criteria for prioritizing the product roadmap and resolving conflicts between competing business requests.
Decide which initiatives should proceed to discovery, enter development planning, be deferred, or be discontinued, within approved executive authority.
Develop business cases outlining target users, customer problems, expected benefits, development requirements, dependencies, and commercial assumptions.
Review the existing portfolio to identify underperforming offerings, overlapping functionality, adoption barriers, and opportunities for consolidation.
Work with Finance to assess development investment, expected returns, ongoing maintenance costs, and resource requirements.
Communicate roadmap decisions and explain trade-offs to stakeholders whose requests cannot be accommodated immediately.
Customer Discovery and Product Direction
Product decisions must be grounded in evidence about real customer needs rather than internal assumptions alone.
Establish a continuous discovery process using customer interviews, usage data, feedback analysis, market research, and sales insights.
Define target customer segments, primary use cases, user problems, and the value proposition for each major product initiative.
Translate customer and market findings into product concepts, requirements, and testable hypotheses.
Validate concepts through prototypes, usability testing, pilot programs, or limited releases before committing substantial development resources.
Work with Marketing and Sales to understand customer expectations, competitive alternatives, positioning requirements, and adoption obstacles.
Define the product experience and functional priorities while balancing customer value, technical constraints, usability, security, and operational requirements.
Revisit product assumptions when adoption, customer feedback, or market conditions diverge from expectations.
Development Execution and Release Management
The VP will establish the conditions required for product teams to deliver predictable, high-quality outcomes.
Partner with engineering and technical leaders to translate approved product priorities into feasible development plans.
Ensure requirements include clear acceptance criteria, intended user outcomes, dependencies, and relevant nonfunctional requirements.
Coordinate roadmap sequencing, development capacity, delivery milestones, and cross-team dependencies.
Establish procedures for managing scope changes, resolving priority conflicts, and escalating material schedule or resource risks.
Review progress against approved commitments and intervene when delivery plans no longer support business priorities.
Coordinate testing, quality assurance, documentation, training, customer communications, and operational readiness before major releases.
Ensure product changes have appropriate support arrangements, ownership, monitoring, and rollback or remediation plans where necessary.
Conduct post-release reviews to identify defects, adoption problems, and improvements required for subsequent releases.
Commercialization and Product Lifecycle Ownership
The VP shares responsibility for ensuring that products succeed beyond technical delivery.
Collaborate with Marketing on positioning, launch messaging, customer education, and go-to-market planning.
Work with Sales and Customer Success to prepare product materials, support customer onboarding, and capture feedback from early users.
Define launch criteria that address product quality, target-customer readiness, support capacity, and commercial requirements.
Monitor product adoption, engagement, retention, customer satisfaction, revenue contribution, and other indicators relevant to each offering.
Evaluate pricing, packaging, feature utilization, and customer demand with the appropriate commercial and finance teams.
Recommend product enhancements, repositioning, expansion, or retirement based on performance evidence.
Maintain a clear feedback loop between customer-facing teams and product development so that recurring issues inform future priorities.
Product Operating Model
The VP will create a product management framework that provides accountability without introducing unnecessary bureaucracy.
This includes a prioritized roadmap, documented product ownership, consistent discovery standards, defined approval points, release criteria, and regular reviews of product performance. Each major initiative should have an accountable owner, a clear business objective, measurable acceptance criteria, and an agreed method for evaluating results.
The VP will also determine how product managers and development teams collaborate, which decisions can be made at team level, and which require executive review. Processes may use agile, iterative, or hybrid delivery methods according to the product's complexity and operating environment.
First-Year Business Outcomes
During the first 12 months, the VP is expected to:
Establish a consolidated product portfolio and identify the highest-priority development opportunities.
Introduce a consistent process for evaluating product proposals and allocating development capacity.
Improve the visibility of roadmap dependencies, delivery risks, and changing requirements.
Strengthen customer discovery and validate major product assumptions before significant investment.
Establish baseline metrics for adoption, quality, delivery reliability, and commercial performance.
Improve coordination between product development and go-to-market teams.
Present a forward-looking product strategy connecting customer needs, business objectives, development investment, and measurable outcomes.
Performance Measures
Performance will be assessed using indicators appropriate to the product portfolio, including:
Percentage of major releases delivered against approved milestones.
Product adoption and engagement among intended customer segments.
Customer retention, satisfaction, and feedback trends.
Development cost variance and the effectiveness of resource allocation.
Product defect rates, post-release incidents, and time required to resolve critical issues.
Revenue contribution, usage growth, or other commercial outcomes where applicable.
Percentage of major initiatives with documented objectives and post-launch evaluations.
Stakeholder alignment and the quality of product prioritization decisions.
Targets will be set after evaluating the existing portfolio, development environment, and available performance data.
Qualifications and Experience
20+ years of progressive professional experience in product management, product development, technology leadership, business operations, or related disciplines.
Demonstrated experience managing product portfolios and guiding initiatives from discovery through development, launch, and ongoing improvement.
Strong commercial judgment and the ability to evaluate customer demand, product economics, and development trade-offs.
Experience translating business requirements into prioritized roadmaps, actionable specifications, and measurable product outcomes.
Familiarity with software development lifecycles, quality assurance, release planning, and cross-functional delivery.
Proven ability to align engineering, marketing, sales, finance, and operational stakeholders.
Experience developing product teams, improving decision processes, and managing competing priorities.
Bachelor's degre

Work arrangement
Yes