Head of Product

Head of Product
Remote (U.S.-based) · Full-TimeOur client is a private-equity-backed business operating in animal health technology, built around two software platforms that complement one another. One supports compliance-driven veterinary workflows for commercial customers; the other functions as an authoritative state-level record system for animal health information.
These two businesses were unified only recently, and the opportunity created by bringing together their data, their customers, and their technology remains largely unrealized — and it's substantial. We're looking for the leader who will define what that opportunity is and turn it into reality.
The charter here centers on growth. You'll shape where the merged company goes next through incisive product strategy, establish disciplined discovery practices, and deliver the products that validate your direction. This position reports directly to the CEO and partners closely with the senior leadership team.Define the Growth Thesis
In roughly your first three months, we'll be counting on you to develop a well-supported, evidence-grounded position on where the company's largest product investments should go. In practice, that involves:

• Producing a documented portfolio approach and a unified roadmap across both companies that commits the business to a clear growth trajectory
• Cataloging and prioritizing potential product directions across five avenues for expansion: cross-selling current software into fresh customer segments, defensibility built on proprietary data, growth in the commercial veterinary space, expansion through the government channel, and neighboring compliance markets
• Quantifying the addressable market for each option with rigor, paired with a well-defined hypothesis about product-market fit
• Standing up and steering fast MVPs alongside your product managers and engineers, engaging customers firsthand and moving quickly to distinguish real signal from noise

Building defensibility from data is an ongoing expectation. Regardless of whether it becomes the marquee initiative, you'll continually explore how the proprietary datasets across both platforms can be merged into a durable competitive advantage.
Build a Validation-Driven Practice
Today the organization tends to build before it validates — correcting that habit is precisely why this role exists. You'll be responsible for:

• Guaranteeing that no meaningful engineering effort ships without a confirmed customer need and clearly stated measures of success — primary, secondary, and guardrail
• Establishing a repeatable pipeline for discovery and validation that runs on one- to two-week loops: from concept, to PRD, to a lean AI-supported build, to customer signal, to a go or no-go call
• Putting in place the operating rhythm, experiment log, and decision records that keep the whole approach durable

Lead and Scale the Product Organization

• Own product KPIs end to end, together with the dashboards leadership genuinely relies on
• Set the direction for the product portfolio and the roadmap spanning both companies
• Embed AI throughout the product team — strengthening front-end prototyping and rapid coding, customer-feedback loops, scoping, collaboration with engineering, and the adoption of AI-based product tooling
• Grow, coach, and lead a lean but energetic group of product managers, with well-defined expectations around performance, professional development, and what excellent product work looks like. Bring on the right hires to enable fast iteration and full-cycle product ownership as major bets come into focus.
• Speak for product in leadership-level strategy conversations and in front of the board
• Work hand in hand with Engineering to tighten scoping, sprint discipline, and predictable delivery

This role calls for a particular kind of leader — someone who has lived on both the strategic and the executional side of product. You understand the distinction between crafting a strong product thesis and actually testing and proving it out, and you draw energy from executing the strategy to produce results. You're just as at home working shoulder-to-shoulder with a product manager as you are presenting a roadmap to a private-equity-backed board.
In more concrete terms:
A record of resolving growth questions

• You've converted business strategy into an ordered product portfolio — not a laundry list, but a reasoned set of prioritized bets
• You've spotted fresh market openings, estimated their size credibly, and argued convincingly for where capital should and shouldn't go
• You've built products that turn proprietary data into a competitive advantage

Discipline in discovery

• You stay in constant contact with customers and have sharp instincts for telling genuine signal apart from noise
• You've built a repeatable discovery-and-testing method that produced real product decisions, and you can walk through precisely how you pulled it off
• You operate fast MVP loops against defined success criteria and record your kill-or-pursue calls with supporting evidence

You get things shipped

• You've led small product-management teams and helped the individuals on them grow
• You've built products customers genuinely value, with retention, adoption, or NPS figures to prove it
• You've taken an informed product strategy from zero to one, driving quantifiable, revenue-generating outcomes you can put numbers to
• You lead by doing as much as directing — drafting a PRD, hopping on a customer call, or clearing a blocker in a sprint are all within your range
• You both cooperate with and push back on engineering to land fully scoped products within timelines everyone has agreed to, and you can hold your own technically when the moment calls for it

Effectiveness at the executive level

• You render complicated product choices into the language of business outcomes without effort
• You can stand behind a product strategy before a private-equity board just as credibly as you show up inside an engineering sprint
• When stakeholders have pressed to expand scope, you've held firm on strategy — backing your position with evidence rather than mere conviction

An AI-native mindset

• You lean on AI tooling to accelerate your own output and think ahead about what AI implies for your market
• You've actually launched AI-powered product capabilities, not merely tinkered with them personally
• You can tell the difference between AI that delivers real customer value and AI that's a solution in search of a problem

• Roughly 7 to 12 years in product overall, including a minimum of 3 in a senior leadership capacity — VP, Head of Product, or something comparable
• A background at a B2B SaaS business, ideally one serving both commercial customers and government or otherwise regulated segments
• Time spent in private-equity-backed or similarly high-accountability settings is a meaningful advantage
• Prior experience with data or platform products is welcome, particularly where proprietary data served as a strategic asset
• Experience navigating post-acquisition integration or a multi-brand portfolio counts in your favor
• A background in agriculture, animal health, government software, or compliance workflows isn't required, but any of them will help you get up to speed faster

If you need a sizable team already in place before you can add value, this isn't the right fit. What you inherit is two product managers and a well-defined charter. Across the first quarter, your contribution will be largely strategic and intellectual — a clear point of view, a prioritized set of opportunities, a discovery process that actually functions. Headcount expands as the strategy justifies it, and we fully expect that it will.
Nor is this a fit for anyone who treats strategy and execution as separate jobs. You'll be expected to own both.