VP, Head of Product

About the role

This is a greenfield product leadership opportunity inside a fast-scaling, PE-backed alternative dispute resolution platform. The company has established itself as one of the nation's leading providers of mediation and arbitration services — recruiting and retaining top-tier neutrals (former judges and senior legal professionals) and connecting them with law firms, businesses, and individuals seeking efficient resolution outside of litigation.

Having built a dominant position in its home market, the company is now executing an ambitious multi-market expansion strategy. Technology is central to that growth. A proprietary case management and workflow platform (internally built) underpins operations, and the company is now investing in senior product leadership to transform that platform into a true competitive advantage.

This role is a direct hire into the executive team — a hands-on leader who will own product strategy, manage external engineering partners, drive roadmap execution, and serve as the primary bridge between business priorities and technology delivery. It's built for someone who has done this before: owned a product, shipped it, and managed the people and vendors required to get there.

Key responsibilities

• Own the long-term product vision and multi-year roadmap aligned to geographic expansion, operational efficiency, neutral productivity, and customer experience.
• Lead build-vs-buy decisions and technology investment recommendations with ROI-based business cases.
• Define clear KPIs, success metrics, and executive sponsorship for every major initiative.
• Own the company’s AI strategy and identify high-value applications to improve workflows, productivity, and user experience.
• Establish a disciplined process for evaluating emerging technologies and competitive threats.
• Build and run a structured intake, prioritization, and planning process for platform enhancements.
• Translate business requirements from neutrals, case managers, operations, finance, and external users into product specs, user stories, and acceptance criteria.
• Lead user acceptance testing and business readiness activities.
• Communicate roadmap priorities, trade-offs, and investment requirements to senior leadership and the board.
• Own software delivery outcomes: quality, velocity, reliability, and predictability.
• Manage and hold accountable the third-party engineering partner(s) responsible for platform development.
• Establish and improve development processes, documentation standards, and release management practices.
• Drive development efficiency through modern tooling and AI-assisted engineering practices.
• Define and track metrics around delivery performance, cycle times, and roadmap execution.
• Serve as the architectural authority for the product ecosystem.
• Define and maintain long-term technical architecture — scalability, maintainability, security, and extensibility.
• Own technical debt management, modernization priorities, and platform documentation.
• Validate that architecture supports multi-region expansion, future acquisitions, and new product opportunities.
• Serve as primary business owner for software development vendors and strategic technology partners.
• Manage vendor performance expectations, delivery outcomes, and key contractual arrangements.
• Own product and engineering budgets and technology investment decisions.

Ideal candidate profile

• Think like a business executive first and a technologist second. Bring strategic vision and operational discipline in equal measure — equally comfortable in a board-level roadmap conversation and a technical architecture review.
• Experience owning and driving outcomes for a business-critical software platform.
• Demonstrated success translating business strategy into shipped technology.
• Experience managing external engineering partners and holding them accountable.
• Solid understanding of software architecture and modern application development.
• Track record of building product management disciplines from the ground up.
• Ability to influence executives, boards, and cross-functional stakeholders.
• Experience scaling technology-enabled services businesses (preferred).
• Background building or modernizing proprietary workflow platforms (preferred).
• Exposure to AI-enabled products and automation implementation (preferred).
• Experience supporting PE-backed businesses through periods of rapid growth (preferred).
• Industry background in legal technology, professional services, healthcare, financial services, or other regulated sectors (preferred).
• Coastal U.S. location preferred (California, New York, Boston/New England).