The VP of Product will sit on the Leadership Team, reporting to Jay Goldklang (Founder & CEO), while also working closely with Abigail Besdin (Co-Founder & Head of Growth), Todd O’Brien (Chief Technology Officer), Pooja Radia (SVP Operations & Customer Experience), and other fellow execs to define company strategy and achieve aggressive business goals.

This position is highly cross-functional and absolutely critical to the realization of our company mission.

In this role, you will first quickly & thoughtfully digest our learnings to date while hopping into our in-flight product development cycles, building relationships across the team, and getting to know our various external stakeholders: property owners, residents, service providers, and other partners.

Then, you will define and lead execution of a detailed, bold, forward-looking product vision, strategy, and roadmap to deliver exceptional owner & resident experiences, find substantial efficiencies, learn rapidly, and enable hypergrowth.

Where in the past, we kept things scrappy and focused on learning – for example, meeting a need by integrating a “good enough” solution with known limitations – our growth means it is now time to build for scale, differentiation, and longer-term durability, while still moving quickly given many opportunities across the rental lifecycle.

Your primary contributions will come through setting product vision & strategy, along with building & managing a product management & design team through its execution. But our stage and culture necessitate that you are also a truly hands-on, low-ego builder.

Sample work could include: 

• Building a Mint/ Robinhood style app so owners can see and manage their rental properties in real-time from wherever they are with the power of real-time data, smart home automation, and predictive analytics at their fingertips
• Building an Uber-style interface so residents can request maintenance, rate their service experiences, pay their rent, or perform any other interaction or communication
• Building and optimizing systemized workflows for everything from leasing to leaky faucets to property optimization
• Discovering new and creative ways to leverage massive public data troves, as well as proprietary ones developed through our own operations, to source and close new potential customers
• Thinking “product first” is the key to pushing the frontier for customer experience, scalability (3-5x+ efficiency vs. competitors), and value creation in this multi-trillion dollar space. Let’s eliminate the pain of rental ownership and renting.
• Your team’s work – delivering digital product that delights our customers and their residents, automates and instruments a traditionally low-tech industry, and enables controlled and elegant scaling of the business – will be an absolutely crucial part of that journey.

Responsibilities 

• Define and lead execution of a detailed, bold, forward-looking product vision, strategy, and roadmap to deliver exceptional owner & resident experiences, find substantial efficiencies, learn rapidly, and enable hypergrowth.
• Partner closely with the CEO and fellow executives to amplify the voice of our users while ensuring our product vision, strategy, and roadmap tie closely to our overall business goals and key metrics.
• Grow and develop an innovative and customer-obsessed product & design team by recruiting talented product managers and designers, coaching them to full potential, and fostering a strong product culture .
• In tandem with our CTO and your respective teams, ensure we have the right team structure, processes, and tools to achieve velocity, quality, transparency, and continuous improvement.
• Clearly communicate the vision, roadmap, prioritization decisions, and insights to the full Great Jones team, offering company-wide insight into what is being worked on and why.
• Continue to infuse user-centric, technology & design-first thinking into our entire company.

Requirements & Personal Competencies 

• Several years of experience managing teams of product managers and designers in a fast-paced, high-growth context, including at least two years as the #1 product executive at a relevant high-growth company
• At least once in the past, you have succeeded in a product leadership role in which you were responsible for making foundational decisions, then building for scale from an early stage. Having done so for a complex SaaS product or multi-sided platform (or similar) is a big plus.
• You are a deeply user-centric problem solver with maniacal customer focus – able to develop real empathy for a wide variety of users, identify needs even in the absence of large sample sets, build in a way that solves for needs identified, then measure & iterate. 
• You are able to define, clearly communicate, and lead the execution of a product vision and strategy that are unifying and inspiring. 
• You enjoy building new products from scratch, not just improving existing ones. You’ve thrived in similar situations in the past. 
• In the face of complexity and many great ideas, you have a truly standout ability to prioritize what matters most, focused on the needs of the business, its customers, and other critical stakeholders. You can do so across contexts: sometimes finding big product-driven wins for our capacity and margins, other times infusing delight into a key customer touchpoint. 
• You move fast. Even in pursuit of large, ambitious goals, your mentality is around finding small pieces to attack, provide real value, and learn from.
• You have a proven track record of relationship-building and executive & people leadership, including knowing when to be empathetic; how to communicate across teams and set and articulate a vision; and how to actively listen and incorporate new ideas. You build fantastic, enduring relationships with technical leaders and partners.
• You attract & retain strong talent and manage your team to do exceptional, highly motivated work, while being hands-on along the way.
• You enjoy thinking through how to improve real people’s workflows and visibility through software. Perhaps you have worked on a SaaS or marketplace platform in the past, delivering elegant, user-centric experiences for multiple user types amid high complexity. Experience thinking through holistic online and offline experiences is a major plus.
• You are ego-free: You value great ideas from people at all levels of the organization 
• Ideally, you have worked successfully with teammates across geographies in the past, given the nature of our operations and team members across markets. You embrace travel as a core part of learning and executing in that context (e.g., 1 week per 6-8 weeks steady-state, potentially more while ramping early on).
• You are able to partner with colleagues to make thoughtful build vs. buy decisions and consider the tradeoffs of ground-up work vs. integration with existing tools or libraries, where relevant for acceleration or practicality.
• Extremely high intellectual horsepower, creativity, and leadership DNA
• Strategic, data-driven, and entrepreneurial mentality 
• Strong analytical background, including the ability to break down and work through complex problems in a structured manner, using both quantitative and qualitative methods
• Ability to tell a persuasive story and convey information in a digestible format (verbal and written), including experience developing board-level presentations and memos self-sufficiently
• Enthusiastic teamwork and collaboration – a trusted advisor to many
• Exceptional organization
• Fast learner with a bias toward rolling up your sleeves and taking action