VP of Product

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a VP of Product based in United States.

This is a hands-on product leadership role at a rapidly growing technology company building an AI-native commerce platform for direct-to-consumer businesses.

• Own product strategy and execution across storefronts, checkout, payments, merchant operations, and the AI agent.
• Define and manage the roadmap as a dynamic portfolio of prioritized opportunities, ensuring every major initiative has a clear business rationale, expected impact, and understood trade-offs.
• Establish a high standard for what constitutes a successfully shipped product, including adoption, measurable business impact, quality, usability, and sustained customer value.
• Provide detailed, hands-on feedback on product requirements, prototypes, specifications, launches, and other critical product work.
• Lead and develop a small team of principal-level Product Managers, setting expectations for quality, speed, ownership, and decision-making.
• Establish strong product management practices, including detailed PRDs, prototypes, specifications, test cases, launch plans, reference customers, and KPIs.
• Build direct relationships with key merchants, participating in regular customer conversations and developing deep knowledge of their businesses, funnels, needs, and pain points.
• Translate recurring merchant challenges into product improvements and ensure meaningful issues move rapidly from customer feedback to execution.
• Define and maintain competitive benchmarks across revenue per visitor, checkout conversion, page speed, approval rates, activation, retention, and user experience.
• Conduct hands-on competitive research by actively using competing products and monitoring changes in competitor offerings, pricing, and roadmaps.
• Ensure material competitive developments are analyzed promptly and translated into actionable response strategies.
• Lead the development of an AI-native product that merchants can confidently use for production-grade, revenue-impacting decisions.
• Personally test AI experiences, establish quality standards, define evaluation criteria, and ensure reliability across non-deterministic AI capabilities.
• Partner closely with the CTO and engineering leadership to align product and engineering execution.
• Ensure product specifications are established before delivery, timelines are visible, delivery risks are surfaced early, and engineering resources remain focused on high-value work.
• Eliminate or deprioritize initiatives that do not demonstrate sufficient customer or business value.
• Use experimentation, including appropriately sized A/B tests, to distinguish genuine product improvements from misleading or insufficient signals.
• Balance short-term execution with longer-term product strategy and contribute directly to strategic decisions about future product investments.
• Support product launches, rollout plans, customer education, incident reviews, and other operational aspects of product delivery.
• Maintain a high level of accountability for product outcomes, execution quality, and measurable customer impact.

• Experience as a #1 or #2 product leader at a growth-stage company.
• Demonstrated ownership of product areas where conversion, latency, reliability, or other product metrics had direct economic consequences.
• Proven ability to improve a product's competitive position against measurable performance or business metrics.
• Experience leading product strategy while remaining deeply involved in execution and product details.
• Strong technical fluency, including the ability to read pull requests, understand technical architecture, follow complex infrastructure or payment flows, and participate meaningfully in engineering discussions.
• Experience using modern AI tools for prototyping, product development, or workflow acceleration.
• Experience shipping AI-powered or LLM-based capabilities into production, with a practical understanding of evaluations, reliability, determinism, and non-deterministic systems.
• Experience building products for customers whose revenue depends directly on product performance.
• Background in fintech, payments, ecommerce, commerce technology, or another environment where conversion, reliability, speed, and availability have direct financial implications is highly valuable.
• Strong experience working directly with customers and translating their needs into product improvements.