The Hired Guns seek a VP of Product to oversee a complete re-imagination of a major publisher of digital news, sports, entertainment and lifestyle content. Digital Transformation is the name of the game, and you’ve got to be the kind of product leader that excels in this arena.
Nitty Gritty
This VP of Product role is mission-critical to the growth of the company. You’ll oversee a team of 6 product leads and work closely with Engineering, Editorial, Aud Dev, and Sales and Marketing, AdOps and beyond. Your job is to create an amazing ecosystem that can scale nationally while also delivering just the right experience that will resonate at a local level.
As a product leader, you understand what it takes to lead a product overhaul inside a legendary publisher. With news that has to get pushed out every day, you won’t have time to simply navel-gaze; heck no. You revel in and excel at rebuilding locomotive engines while they’re moving at 100 mph.
What Success Looks Like
You figure out how to make the triple threat of content, community, and commerce work in harmony so that hard news can be appropriately funded. That means while you have a mindset to build digital products worthy of hungry audiences and strong digital advertising, you also have strong hunches around how to build affiliate revenue through commerce and content, yield management, better ADTech, and beyond.
Hired Gun Profile
Your data-driven orientation coupled with your strategic yet collaborative nature makes you well-suited to this role. And while you’re no stranger to building first-time-ever products, your real gift is leading and evolving transformation initiatives. You’re not only a business-builder, but a trust builder. Recreating audience development and affiliate partnerships isn’t going to happen overnight or by your lonesome, so step one is to build a coalition around the special challenges and goalposts that come with a protracted mission like this one.
You come packing a futurist mindset for how news will survive and thrive and a strong point of view around what’s necessary to ensure it. While you are a change agent who is skilled at roadblock manipulation, you know how to coalition build like Churchill. A product dictator barking commands won’t work inside this org. You’ll be working here with lots of generals on the ground who know their markets like no one else.
You have the killer combo of building consumer-facing media products, combined with oversight of ADTech and eComm. You believe newspapers aren’t dying but evolving, and you’re eager to do some selective breeding to make new revenue models work.
While an MBA would be a nice-to-have, it’s not required so long as you have a strategic mindset and a bias for action. You’ll have great partners in Engineering, UX and Design to make your vision come to life.
Inside Skinny
If you’re already using AI and machine learning to deliver news, make sure this is well highlighted on your resume.
Net-Net
You’ve shown your abilities at what few people can do. Now it’s time to try them at a breadth that few companies can offer. A great gig for someone who only finds pinball exciting during multiball, while also advising the people on either side of them how to beat the game.
All qualified applicants will receive consideration without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, creed, age, sexual orientation, veteran status, marital status, disability, or any other status protected by applicable law.
