VP of Product

The product: Storefronts, checkout, payments, the merchant OS, and the AI agent. Roadmap,
sequencing, specs, quality, and rollout. And a much higher bar for the word "shipped". A feature
flag is not shipped. An announcement is not shipped. Live in production on the date we promised
is not shipped either. Shipped means merchants found it, adopted it, and would be annoyed if we
took it away. It means the execution was elegant, the business problem it was built for is gone,
and we can draw a straight line from it to Phoenix making more money or a merchant growing
faster. Anything short of that is still in progress, and you are the person who refuses to call it
done.

The scoreboard: Objectively measurable superiority against our direct competitors. Revenue
per visitor, checkout conversion, page speed, approval rate, activation, retention, and user
experience, benchmarked consistently. You have accounts on every competitor's product and you
actually use them, so you know exactly where we are better and where we are not. A/B tests with
real sample sizes, and the honesty to know when we are winning versus when merchant behavior
is flattering us.

The PM team: Lead and raise a small team of principal-level product managers. Set the standard
for what a Phoenix PM ships: PRDs with prototypes, specs with test cases, launches with
reference merchants and KPIs. Coach fast, decide fast.

Merchant truth: Direct relationships with our top merchants. You sit in their channels, you are
on calls weekly, you know their funnels and their complaints from memory, and repeat pain
points become shipped fixes in weeks, not quarters. Merchants want to talk to you because you
know their pain points and our product cold. They leave the conversation better at running their
business, and you leave it knowing more about what we should build next.

The AI-native product: Make the Phoenix agent something merchants rely on for production-
grade decisions on real revenue, not a demo. You test it the way a merchant would, you define
what "good" means, and you hold the line on quality.

The delivery machine: Partner with the CTO and the engineering leads so product and
engineering move as one motion. Specs before delivery, every card with a date, slips visible
before anyone asks, and a sniff for wasted engineering hours. You kill work that doesn't earn its
place.

Competitive intelligence: Know every competitor's product, pricing, and roadmap better than
they do. When a competitor or a major platform ships something material, our response memo
exists within 48 hours.

● A builder, not a coordinator. You have been the #1 or #2 product leader at a growth-stage
company, you have owned a product surface where conversion, latency, and reliability
carried direct economic consequences, and you stepped up in scope rather than back.
● A missile, not a passenger. You are an entrepreneur at heart who operates with a lot of
autonomy and solves problems instead of escalating them. You don't bring us problems;
you bring solutions and the resources you need to execute.
● You have taken a product from behind a competitor to ahead on a measurable metric, and
you can show the before and after.
● In the weeds by choice. You use the product every day, you would rather test a flow
yourself than read a report about it, and you see the bug before the customer reports it. A
product leader who "stays above the details" makes you uncomfortable.
● Technical enough to be dangerous. You read PRs, you can follow a gateway migration or
understand why a cron job is locking a table, and you hold your own in an architecture
conversation. You are a power user of modern AI tools, you prototype before you spec,
and you have shipped AI into production with real opinions on determinism, evaluations,
and building reliably on non-deterministic layers.
● You have built for customers whose revenue depends on your product. Fintech,
payments, commerce, or another domain where your conversion, reliability, and speed
show up directly in your customer's P&L, so you already know what it costs when the
product is down and the customer finds out first.
● A drill sergeant with no ego. You give very tactical, in-depth feedback on the work PMs
and engineers are actually doing. You hold the bar, address underperformance early, tell
people directly, and admit your own mistakes fast.
● Execution and strategy, not one or the other. You ship every week and kill work that
doesn't matter, and you can hold your own in a three-year strategy debate because your
opinions come from the ground. You also do the unglamorous parts: rollout plans, launch
education, incident reviews, the requirements doc nobody wants to write.
● Startup-forged. You have thrived in fast, resource-constrained, high-intensity
environments in the last 5 years.
● No tolerance for mediocrity. The individuals that thrive here hold themselves and others
to an extremely high standard with no exceptions. We're here to build a generational company.

Huge Plus
● Ecommerce, direct response, or high-risk payments experience. You have built checkout,
subscription billing, or payments products for merchants, or you have worked inside a
company in our competitive set.
● You have run a DTC or direct response store yourself and know what a broken checkout
feels like on a Friday night.

● You still write code, or you build working prototypes with AI tools instead of slide decks.
● You have shipped an AI agent or LLM-powered feature that customers rely on in
production.
● You have founded a company, or been an early operator who owned the outcome.