VP, Product

Position Overview

The Vice President, Product helps raise the quality, speed, and ambition of product development across the Cordance portfolio. This is not a traditional single-company VP of Product role. The VP partners with BU Presidents, Product leaders, and Engineering teams to strengthen product strategy, improve the quality of major product bets, and help our businesses build products that drive growth, retention, and long-term value. The mandate spans executive advisory work on major product decisions, raising product capability and craft across the portfolio, and helping teams use AI to rethink both what they build and how they build it.

Success in this role means our businesses make better product choices, validate ideas earlier, build faster, and put more of their product and engineering capacity behind the opportunities most likely to improve customer value and business performance. It also means our Presidents and Product leaders become stronger product thinkers, and our best product practices spread more quickly across the portfolio.

Key Responsibilities

• Partner with BU Presidents and Product Leaders
  • Help Presidents and Product leaders turn customer needs, market opportunities, and business priorities into clear product strategies and roadmaps.
  • Challenge assumptions on product-market fit, differentiation, prioritization, and investment before major decisions are made.
  • Help teams move beyond feature roadmaps toward stronger customer-, market-, and outcome-based product decisions.
  • Get directly involved in important product decisions where additional product leadership can materially improve the outcome.
• Improve the Quality of Product Bets
  • Assess major product bets on customer value, market opportunity, differentiation, expected business impact, required investment, and execution feasibility.
  • Help teams determine where to invest, test, accelerate, modernize, or stop.
  • Bring rigor to early product validation so teams learn quickly before committing significant engineering capacity.
  • Connect product decisions to measurable results, including adoption, retention, expansion, ARR growth, and customer value.
• Build Products in the AI Age
  • Help teams identify AI-native opportunities rather than simply adding AI features to existing products.
  • Apply AI across discovery, prototyping, validation, development, testing, launch, and ongoing optimization.
  • Help Product and Engineering teams use AI-assisted development to improve speed and time to market.
  • Bring practical fluency in AI-enabled UX, automation, agentic workflows, data, model economics, security, and privacy.
  • Ensure AI investments are grounded in real customer and business outcomes, not novelty.
• Raise Product Capability Across the Portfolio
  • Coach senior Product leaders and PMs to become better product and business leaders.
  • Strengthen discovery, prioritization, MVP definition, roadmap strategy, experimentation, and product measurement.
  • Establish a small number of practical product standards and operating rhythms that improve execution without slowing teams down.
  • Identify common capabilities, tools, and patterns that can be leveraged across businesses where it makes sense.
  • Introduce current SaaS and AI product thinking while respecting the unique markets and customer needs of each business.
• Connect Product, Engineering, and Business Strategy
  • Work closely with Engineering leaders so product strategy and technical decisions reinforce one another.
  • Engage credibly on SaaS architecture, cloud, APIs, data, platforms, AI, and scalability.
  • Help teams think clearly about build, buy, partner, and platform choices.
  • Maintain a strong customer and business orientation while working across technical and commercial teams.

Competencies:

• Product Judgment – Identifies important customer problems, validates opportunities, and makes clear prioritization decisions.
• Builder Mindset – Creates and improves products rather than simply managing roadmaps or large Product organizations.
• AI-Native Thinking – Sees where AI changes what gets built and how teams build it, and focuses on value over novelty.
• Commercial Fluency – Connects product decisions to adoption, retention, expansion, monetization, and ARR growth.
• Influence Without Authority – Earns credibility with CEOs, Presidents, and Product leaders and influences through expertise and judgment.
• Leader Development – Coaches senior Product leaders and PMs to become stronger product and business leaders.
• Technical Credibility – Engages effectively with Engineering while remaining fundamentally customer- and product-led.
• Bias for Outcomes – Values judgment, speed, and measurable results over process for its own sake.

Required Qualifications

• Significant B2B SaaS product leadership experience, including leading products from early concept through launch and scale.
• Demonstrated success creating and improving products, not simply managing roadmaps or large Product organizations.
• Hands-on experience applying AI to both product development and customer-facing products.
• Strong understanding of SaaS economics, including adoption, retention, expansion, monetization, and growth.
• Experience working directly with CEOs, Presidents, or senior business leaders.
• Experience coaching and developing senior Product leaders and PMs.
• Technical fluency in SaaS architecture, cloud, APIs, data, platforms, and scalability.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working across multiple products, markets, or businesses.
• Portfolio, multi-business, or PE-backed operating experience.
• Vertical SaaS experience.