Job Description

Vice President of Product

Kipsu is rooted in a simple, yet profound goal: Elevate service professionals to the center of the customer experience, transforming transactional interactions into fully-developed relationships through the use of our leading edge digital messaging capabilities. As one of the Twin Cities’ leading growth stage technology companies, Kipsu has cultivated a reputation for strong company culture, providing exemplary service to its customer partners, and investing in the growth of its team members. Kipsu was recognized by Star Tribune as a top small company workplace for 2021. Our Vice President of Product will be helping us conceptualize new product offerings and will be central to Kipsu’s growth over the next five years.

THE OPPORTUNITY

As Kipsu’s Vice President of Product you will be responsible for leading the team that develops the portfolio of product offerings for Real-Time Engagement, or “RTE,” a category we are pioneering and developing alongside many of the leading service brands in the world. In this leadership role, you will help us develop our product roadmap, prioritize new product opportunities, build the business cases for new initiatives and execute on the roll-out of new offerings. Kipsu has a strong market leadership position and we are at an exciting time to build on our prior success and fundamentally change the customer experience domain. New product introductions will be a major contributor to Kipsu’s increased growth and our product function will play a “front and center” role in helping drive that growth.

.WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Report directly to our CEO and partner with our executive leadership team to:
  • Help us conceptualize new products, including building the business case and validating market potential, for both new market segments and add-ons to our current offerings
  • Champion our product roadmap through continuous engagement with our customer partners and customer-facing team members, including:
    • Solutions for new vertical segments we are entering
    • Add-on offerings for our existing customer partners
    • New data and analytics capabilities that will serve as product offerings to existing and adjacent customers
  • Drive maturation of existing products by developing a deep understanding of usage insights and trends
  • Lead the execution of launch plans and product roll-outs by working across the organization to take a product from concept to general availability
  • Drive our institutional expertise on target user personas and segments, how users and consumers adopt our solution, how we differentiate in the market and why customer partners buy our solution
  • Work with our sales and marketing teams to identify customer personas and develop deliverables that enable successful adoption of our new products and features
  • Build a competency to measure and drive product efficacy-driven improvements
• Build and lead a team of product marketers that will help us assess new product feasibility and business impact, execute product roll-outs and help us grow our total addressable market
• Oversee, support and grow our excellent product management team that performs requirements gathering, UX/UI and functional design and hand-off into our software engineering and QA teams
• Support our sales and customer success functions in responding to current customers on product feasibility, enhancements and roadmapping with key customer partners

WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR

• 12+ years of product experience
• 3+ years of experience in an senior product team leadership role inside of a SaaS technology company or SaaS product offering
• Industry experience in hospitality, healthcare or multi-family a plus
• Demonstrated strong experience in product marketing; comfortable working with marketing and sales to understand market needs, develop go-to-market strategies and sales enablement
• Someone who can work across our organization, capable of mobilizing action with team members that don’t directly report to you and is comfortable in a “no politics” environment
• Driven to build process to drive consistency in service delivery
• High degree of empathy to deeply understand customer needs and optimize product adoption by assessing user habits
• Comfort with having critical conversations that help drive understanding and alignment
• Bias to use data and leverage resources in the market to validate product decisions and improvement
• Preference for candidates with experience with: 1) Data and analytics products; and 2) the productization of leading edge machine learning and natural language processing technologies
• Desire to work with a high energy team that is largely working in the office together to solve challenging problems
• Strong detail orientation
• Nerdy about measuring product efficacy to drive product impact and activate step function changes in our efficacy in the real world
• High degree of organization skills; biased to manage complex projects through project work plans to drive focus and accountability

WHAT MAKES KIPSU DIFFERENT

• We’re a solid, stable growing company, and we enthusiastically embrace our founding startup spirit– everyone pitching in and working to the same goals.
• Our culture– We have a team of highly motivated colleagues who are all in it together. We all succeed as one, and we all learn from our mistakes holding our interdependence in high regard.
• Our unique philosophy– we bootstrapped this company ourselves and are in it for the long-term. There is a distinct sense of purpose and ownership at Kipsu as we do things on our own terms.
• Remarkable growth– with nearly a decade of advancement, we continue to accelerate. It’s an exciting time to be here.

WHY YOU’LL LOVE IT HERE

• Unity– Everyone here is committed to the same mission. Our core values are not platitudes but our pact. We believe in the best in each other while always reaching to be better.
• Transparency– Our leadership gets into the details. We all gather for weekly space to discover how each team is doing so that we have a full understanding of the business and think like a CEO.
• Trust– Our team members are given the trust and license to excel at their jobs, and are supported along the way to continuously grow.
• Respect– Our success and future as an industry leader depend on actionable commitment to cultivating a diverse and equitable team. Everyone here has a voice that is heard and respected. We seek open and honest conversation on our journey to be active stewards of our shared communities.
• Purpose– Everyone here is closely connected to the result of their work. Every day our team gets to see the impact of what they do enhancing the value of our customers’ work in their own professions. Our goals are explicitly tethered to our mission of building relationships.

One last thing – At Kipsu, we believe that our values, success, and future as a leader in our industry require a vibrant and diverse workforce. This is one of the many challenges we seek to solve, and we are intentional and active in recruiting talent of all identities and building an environment that is inclusive of all backgrounds. We need your contribution to our team. Please consider rolling up your sleeves and joining us on our journey.