Vice President of Product Innovation
Rustici Software · Franklin, TN · 6 days ago
HybridManagementFull-time
Key Responsibilities
- Market-Driven Discovery: Act as a critical voice of the customer, engaging in direct market validation and customer discovery to ensure AI initiatives solve real-world workflows and industry standards.
- Primary Product Owner: Act as the lead, initially, day-to-day Product Manager for the flagship AI-focused product lines, owning the roadmap, writing requirements, and defining technical specs.
- Value Mapping: Ensure all AI product investments articulate clear business outcomes, drive revenue growth, expand margins, and compound long-term enterprise value.
- Cross-Infrastructure Coordination: Collaborate with core product PMs to align on dependencies and ensure next-gen AI features integrate with and enhance legacy infrastructure products without disrupting system stability.
- C-Suite & GTM Alignment: Partner with the CEO, CTO, and Sales leader to define pricing/packaging enablement, create the AI-forward growth narrative, and support high-value enterprise sales opportunities and strategic partnerships.
Qualifications
- 8+ years in B2B SaaS product management, developer platforms, enterprise software, or APIs, with proven experience in a product leadership capacity.
- Greenfield Product Experience: Demonstrated track record of taking greenfield products to market, which includes identifying opportunities before there is a roadmap, validating demand with customers, and building alignment to create growth.
- AI-Native Expertise: Demonstrated track record of conceptualizing, prototyping, or deploying live, production-grade AI systems. This could be across legacy “AI” solutions, LLMs, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), agentic workflows, or semantic data models.
- Infrastructure Platform Experience: Deep understanding and experience managing developer-focused infrastructure products serving platform providers, developers, and content infrastructure teams.
- Direct experience engaging in commercial validation, creating business cases, and identifying market value as a core part of the product development process.
- Familiarity with the learning / HR software industry is preferred.
Skills & Capabilities
- Exceptional Communication & Influence: Proven ability to sit with deeply technical engineers to discuss data architecture, coordinate laterally with peer PMs without organizational friction, and present compelling product visions to C-suite executives and enterprise clients.
- Commercial Instincts: Strong ability to connect product & architectural decisions to commercial outcomes, market demand signals, and pricing strategies.
- Execution-First: A history of managing projects, products, and cross-functional initiatives in lean, fast-moving environments. Ready to roll up your sleeves as an individual contributor on day one.
- Must be highly proficient in basic PM blocking-and-tackling (backlog management, user stories, cross-team dependency mapping).