Vice President Product, Design

Key Responsibilities

• Design Leadership
• Create a strategic hiring plan (in-house + partner ecosystem), manage budget, and establish vendor strategy for surge and specialized needs.
• Foster a culture of craft excellence, curiosity, and accountability—with consistent critique, coaching, and peer development.
• Establish a clear engagement model that embeds design and research directly within durable product teams—rather than operating as a shared service—supported by defined decision rights and expectations.
• Coach design leaders and teams to operate with high autonomy and accountability, embracing “strong opinions, loosely held” and prioritizing evidence over escalation.
• Experience & Product Strategy
• Translate company strategy and the 2026 priorities into a cohesive experience vision, north-star journeys, and an outcome-oriented experience strategy and set of prioritized customer opportunities portfolio roadmap that aligns across Product, Engineering, and Go-to-Market.
• Define how we measure design’s impact on customer and business outcomes (adoption, retention, revenue influence, operational efficiency).
• Define experience principles and guardrails that enable teams to move quickly while maintaining a cohesive customer experience - ensuring clarity, consistency, accessibility, trust, and safety.
• Partner with Product and Engineering to translate strategy into outcomes and problems to solve, not feature lists, empowering teams to determine the right solutions.
• Research, Insights & Evidence-Based Decisions
• Establish a rigorous UXR practice (qualitative, quantitative, and telemetry) and a research repository that continuously feeds discovery and de-risks decisions.
• Champion continuous discovery in empowered product teams (field observation, rapid testing, experiment design) and ensure insights are valid, actionable, and durable.
• Establish and champion a continuous-discovery cadence where weekly routines include customer conversations, fast prototyping, and data-driven experiments, replacing long, infrequent research cycles.
• Enable teams to instrument experiences with meaningful leading indicators—task success, time-to-value, error rates, trust/confidence signals—so decisions are measured by impact, not activity.
• Design Systems & Accessibility at Scale
• Treat the design system as a product—with a roadmap, governance, and documented tokens/patterns that accelerate delivery of coherent, accessible experiences.
• Define standards for accessibility, internationalization, security, and regulatory compliance across web, mobile, and device interfaces (SaaS/IoT).
• Shift governance from top-down approval to scalable enablement, offering reusable patterns, templates, and self-serve tools that preserve quality without slowing teams down.
• Delivery Excellence & Portfolio Governance
• Implement lightweight, team-owned delivery practices that support continuous delivery - clear intent, rapid iteration, measurable outcomes, and defined quality bars - while maintaining predictable design workflows (briefs, milestones, QA, handoff) that balance craft with delivery velocity.
• Run portfolio-level design reviews to ensure cross-product coherence, reduce design/tech debt, and make trade-offs transparent and deliberate.
• Ensure discovery and delivery are tightly connected - teams should validate assumptions before building and refine solutions through iterative releases, reducing big-batch handoffs and phase-gate cycles.
• Product Operating Model Enablement
• Embed the Product Trio model (Product, Design, Engineering) at the team level, fostering shared ownership of outcomes, clear decision rights, and empowered judgment.
• Improve organizational decision quality by standardizing discovery practices—opportunity framing, prototype testing, assumption mapping, and experiment design—and coaching leaders to ask better questions rather than request additional artifacts.
• Partner with Product and Engineering leadership to shift away from project-model behaviors (heavy upfront requirements, downstream design, output-based commitments) toward true outcome-based accountability.
• Cross-Functional Executive Partnership
• Operate as an equal partner to Product and Engineering in vision, roadmapping, and prioritization; shape scope to protect experience quality while hitting timelines.
• Collaborate with Marketing, CX, and Sales to ensure end-to-end journey consistency and equip field teams with clear narratives and artifacts (demos, playbooks).
• Reinforce an outcomes-focused culture by valuing learning, customer impact, and smart decision-making—not excessive artifacts or cosmetic perfection.

Qualifications

• Customer Focus: Keeps the customer’s voice central via research, testing, and telemetry - driving measurable improvements in adoption, efficiency, and satisfaction.
• Strategic Mindset: Shapes a north-star experience vision aligned to business strategy and evolving user/technology trends in the connected-mobility ecosystem.
• Product Operating Model Transformation: Demonstrated success institutionalizing a modern Product Operating Model with empowered cross-functional teams, clear decision rights, discovery-first practices, accountability and transparency.
• Executive Decision Quality: Makes timely, evidence-based calls using data, research, and prototypes; ensures ownership and alignment across functions.
• Accountability: Sets high standards for craft and delivery; defines outcomes and builds a culture of ownership, clarity, and reliable follow-through.
• Talent & Team Leadership: Scales and mentors a diverse org; strengthens cross-functional partnership; fosters a high-performance, growth-oriented environment.
• Innovation: Drives experimentation and prototyping; converts learning—successful or not—into repeatable patterns and systems.
• Executive Communication & Influence: Tells a compelling story with clarity and empathy; aligns executives and teams around journeys, rationale, and trade-offs.
• Coaching & Empowerment: Demonstrated ability to coach leaders and teams toward empowered, evidence-based decision-making—reducing reliance on centralized approvals while improving both quality and speed.
• Systems Thinking: Skilled at designing the overall “system of work”—including team interfaces, governance mechanisms, metrics, and incentives—so that healthy product behaviors become the natural default.