Director of Product Strategy

This position has been filled. Please visit our Careers page for other openings.

As Director of Product Strategy, you will be responsible for defining, differentiation and defensibility for current and future GovDocs Employment Law Compliance products serving the Fortune 1000 market. You will develop product strategy that aligns to the company vision, defining how each product will compete and win in the market. The right candidate will be able to manage the day-to-day product team function while working with the executive team and partnering with marketing, compliance, technology and nearly all areas of the business to design, distill and communicate the bets, hypotheses and business cases that will define our market position.

You will own and manage the qualitative client research function in the business, defining and prioritizing input from current customers as inputs into the product processes. For new products, you will be responsible for market and customer discovery, product concept creation and validation, business case creation and presentation and generating alignment across the company.

The role requires experience in strategic thinking, building business cases and getting buy-in from the organization while building, scaling, and managing the product organization and team. The ideal candidate will have a strong client services acumen, coupled with high EQ and presentation skills. In addition, she or he will be organized, analytical, and embrace a disciplined and rigorous product development and launch process. This position reports to the Vice President of Growth with a strong dotted line to the CEO and founder.

What you will (have the freedom to) do…

• Build a point of view on differentiation and defensibility for all products in the company, defining what product attributes are ‘table stakes’ and what will define a successful market position
• Own market and customer discovery for new products, defining and validating winning positions in the market, produce pilot investment recommendations and gain buy-in from leadership across the company
• Lead and mentor a 3-person product team made up of product managers and a user experience designer in all aspects of the product management discipline to build, deliver, and continuously improve upon their product roadmaps.
• Maintain a high degree of communication across software engineering, client services, implementation, legal compliance, sales, and marketing departments to generate alignment and enthusiasm for the vision and objectives of the products and ELC platform.
• Develop and present product business plans, business cases, go-to-market plans, product positioning, product briefs, sales training, and competitive analysis.
• Define and drive product management processes as a discipline across the organization (from strategic planning to tactical activities).
• Implement best practices around story-writing, issue prioritization, and delivering complex features using an iterative, Minimum Marketable Feature approach.
• Work cross-functionally with internal departments to ensure seamless delivery of strategies within the lifecycle of existing products.
• Analyze industry trends in each target market segment.
• Develop a short and long-term portfolio strategy and portfolio roadmap.
• Perform ongoing competitive assessments by product line to ensure viability of products.
• Document and socialize business value of solutions to assist other areas of the organization in educating, marketing and supporting customers.
• Interact with various departments (Engineering, Legal Compliance, Marketing, Sales, Client Services) to understand, discover, and identify untapped product potential and use cases for existing products or new product opportunities.
• Participate in Agile development practices and proactively help the software engineering team understand the vision and requirements to ensure accurate implementation.
• Develop a deep understanding of our industry, including meeting directly with customers (from end users to key decision makers) to capture market requirements for new and existing products, ensuring a balance of product innovation and evolution.
• Get smarter at your job by reading books and blogs.
• Give credit to your team, more than to yourself.
• Ask why, a fair amount.
• Invent moments of silliness.
• Encourage curiosity.

You would be a great fit at GovDocs if you worry and think about the following…

• The voice of the customer and if our products are compelling to our customers.
• Have we made this product as easy to use as humanly possible?
• Will this product succeed against the competition? Not today’s competition but future competition?
• Do I know customers who will really buy this product? Not the product I wish we were going to build but what we’re really going to build?
• Is my product truly differentiated? Can I explain the differentiation to a company executive in two minutes? To a smart customer in one minute?
• How will the product roll up into our company’s larger strategy and a connected user experience platform?
• Are the products’ strengths consistent with what is important to our customers? Which customers?
• How much money is the product worth to our customers? Can they get it cheaper somewhere else?
• Does everyone on the Product Team clearly understand what product and process they own and are accountable for in the product management process?
• Does everyone across the company understand the product strategy for GovDocs and can articulate where we are going as a company?
• Ensuring you are gathering input and collaborating with leaders and departments across the company.

Who you are…

• 8+ years’ experience in SaaS product management, with at least 2 years at the Director level supporting a growth-oriented company (preferably with 15%+ CAGR over past 5 years).
• Experience working in fast-paced and iterative product development cycles, experience with continuous delivery and dual-track agile preferred.
• Certification and/or training through Pragmatic Marketing, Product Focus, Stage Gate or similar Product Management focused organization.
• Previous experience leading a team of 3 or more product managers.
• Demonstrated success in defining, implementing, and advocating effective product management processes, methods, and tools.
• Demonstrated ability to manage multiple mature product lines in a competitive market.
• Demonstrated ability to identify, plan and execute on new product opportunities in existing verticals and new verticals.
• Experience presenting to and leading customer advisory councils/boards.
• Previous ownership of product strategies, road maps, release plans, requirements documents and go-to-market plans.
• Ability to think and plan long-term but execute in the short-term.
• Prior experience in building products on Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, Salesforce Platform or Microsoft Azure.
• Familiarity with data architecture, database systems, and SQL is a plus.
• Assertive and proactive personality – brave enough to put forth strategic product ideas for senior leadership to consider.
• A true love for great product design with the ability to empathize with customers and articulate their fears, pain-points, frustration, and anger.

Company Background

GovDocs serves companies in building and executing their employment law compliance programs in two primary ways.

Employment Law Posting Service: We manage all the complexities of identifying and providing the necessary set of labor postings from the 1,500+ potential postings across the U.S. and Canada. Using proprietary technology, we allow companies to manage, track and verify postings at each of their locations – including our patent pending PosterCheck. Our Employment Law Posting Update service is used by almost 20% of the Fortune 500 and 30% of the Fortune 50.

Employment Law Data Service: This is a first-to-market service starting with GovDocs Minimum Wage and including GovDocs Paid Leave App, which allows companies to identify and track which laws apply to their locations, then provides all relevant data to make decisions. This service was created in response to requests from some of our largest customers who recognized that employment law expansion across and variances between jurisdictions (federal, state, county and city) were too challenging to manually track.

GovDocs has grown revenue annually by 22% since 2008 with 96% customer retention rate, primarily due to our Posting Update Service both obtaining and retaining customers – as employment law posters are required by law, every company has an existing provider. Our Data Services is an entirely new line of business that gives us great growth potential to create a full Employment Law Compliance (ELC) platform, it is also challenging us to reinvent how we view urgency, innovation and team work.

Send resume, salary requirements and cover letter to:
[email protected]