VP of Product

VP of Product
Company Summary:
Our mission at RPI Print is to enable creative people and professionals to design, build and deliver high-quality photo products worldwide. We help creators create.
To get there, we need exceptionally talented, bright, and driven people. Want to help millions of people visually communicate their thoughts, dreams, teachings, and ideas? Come join our team!

We are looking for an experienced Product leader who wants to bring their talents into an incredibly rewarding space. To work at Blurb/RPI, you need to be as passionate as we are about our work, have a strong dedication to our products and users, and be excited to partner with us to achieve our mission of connecting creators with their audiences - whether it's one, one hundred, or thousands. At the end of the day, we produce tangible, tactile keepsakes from an architect's portfolio book, a family keepsake photobook, a photographer's zine or Christmas cards delivered to your many friends. To support your business, we produce millions of personalized business cards, mailers, flyers, and banners every year - printing, packaging and shipping within 24 hours!
Why RPI Print?
We have a unique, loyal, and growing customer base of creative professionals, SMB's, and a large group of aspirational photographers, artists and consumers who value good design and quality printed photo products. Our years in the business innovating and leading the dynamic photo-book and photo market allows us to help design, market and sell our customers' products for themselves or others. Uniquely, we also help them sell their work in various ways, whether directly to their followers, through our store, on Amazon or through distributors. Our customers seek more variety and aesthetic design to differentiate themselves and their products and we're there to support them with photo books, cards, business cards, photo calendars, framed photos, banners, elegant menus and other tools for communication tools, leveraging our print-on-demand (POD) expertise.
We pride ourselves on a unique culture based on transparency, trust and collaboration with accountable decision making. We work hard to make Blurb a great brand and work to make RPI Print a fun, impactful, and great place to work. Do you want to improve the way we all see the world? Come join us!
The Opportunity:
Blurb/RPI possesses a strong core business with growth drivers in its existing markets and unrealized potential with product and geographic expansion opportunities. Noteworthy aspects of this investment include:

• A compelling financial profile:
• >$150M in revenue
• Healthy and growing EBITDA
• >15% CAGR
• 4 state-of-the-art factories around the world
• On-site, or hybrid depending on role
• Regular on-site team meetings

Role Summary:
RPI Print is seeking a VP of Product with an exceptional track record of success and leadership to help lead the company through its next phase of profitable growth. The VP of Product will work closely with the CEO and will collaborate extensively with the Executive Leadership Team, in developing and executing Blurb/RPI's growth strategy.
VP of Product Responsibilities:

- Leadership

• Uphold the voice of the customer on the executive team.
• Own the product vision and roadmap, and communicate with C-level staff, board members and other stakeholders.
• Define hiring plans for the team and work with the People Team to recruit, motivate, and retain world-class talent.
• Create alignment throughout the company - focusing all efforts on the initiatives that are most impactful, communicating reasoning and urgency.
• Provide transformational leadership to a team of product managers, with a focus on developing agile and strategic executors.
• Implement prioritization processes based on business ROI analysis, collaboration with business stakeholders on company targets by delivering product solutions.
• Lead technical inbound collaboration with the Engineering Department.
• Manage the Product, Design, and Roadmap, to deliver on company OKRs of net revenue and customer satisfaction.

- Product Vision and Strategy

• Manage and communicate internal strategic plans for each product or product lines working closely with Marketing.
• Define value proposition, and competitive positioning for each product working closely with marketing.
• Assess product development sprints and enhancement opportunities.
• Drive innovative ideas, solutions and products through leadership and decisive action.
• Lead data-related discussions - ensuring that stakeholders have the correct data.
• Prioritize big design initiatives and be responsible for the end-to-end cohesiveness of the product experience.

- Feature Development

• Build, iterate, optimize, and perfect the product roadmap.
• Evaluate the existing funnel optimization opportunities and conduct large-scale hypothesis-driven feature development through qualitative and quantitative research and multivariate tests.
• Create requirement documents that include user stories and acceptance criteria for new products and features.

- Cross-Functional Teamwork

• Work regularly with a cross-functional team to design, develop, test, and release product changes.
• Use agile technologies to build, iterate and optimize the roadmap to meet the company's KPIs across all teams.
• Make quick decisions about what to do (and what not to do) and communicate with teams.

- Reporting/ Measuring Success

• Define resources required for success and assess the team on their ability to meet targets time to market for company initiatives.
• Ongoing evaluations that measure the success of new features in hitting KPIs.
• Generate and go deep on consumer insights, competitive intelligence, and data analytics to learn what works and what doesn't, to deliver growth-driving product innovation and iteration.

- Hybrid and on-site development teams

• Experience with offshore software development (Hybrid, local UX/UI Product design, offshore front, and back-end engineering) is a plus

- Additional duties as assigned

Candidate Competencies and Outcomes (nice to haves):
Given the importance of the position to Blurb/RPI's planned growth, the ideal candidate will bring the following background and experience:

• Experience leading and scaling product management function in a high-growth, multi-product B2B SaaS organization that has grown organically & through M&A ($150M+ revenue)
• Industry spokesperson and subject matter expertise and/or passion in one or more areas: book creation, book or magazine publishing, photography, design, creator sales & marketing, high-design, as well as understanding today's evolving consumer.
• Expertise operating complex product strategies, rationalizing products, managing budgets, and leading hands-on execution
• Deep M&A exposure, including a strong strategic orientation with experience designing and executing on an integration strategy amongst multiple acquired solutions
• Track record of creating, championing, and executing on a market-leading software vision, which is innovative and spans product lines.
• Strong knowledge of enterprise software infrastructure and the underlying modern principals of software development
• Track record of successfully partnering with senior leaders including a CEO and or Board of Directors to achieve company goals
• Experience working with and presenting product vision/strategy to customers, potential customers, analysts, and outside stakeholders
• Experience driving transition from legacy on-prem solutions to SaaS platform
• Demonstrated success releasing products and features to market on time and on budget
• Able to understand highly technical products and experience partnering with engineers to drive execution
• Demonstrated track record of success working with cross-functional leaders to achieve business outcomes
• Demonstrated success building trust and credibility with existing talent while also hiring new team members and bringing the group together to form a high-performing team
• Smart and agile problem solver, with low ego and high integrity
• Strong leader who can say 'no' when appropriate and make tough decisions when there are competing priorities - disagree and commit.
• Demonstrated track record of success building productive relationships and working effectively with cross-functional leaders to achieve business outcomes
  

Continue to Uplevel Product Management

Partner with the product team on the following:

• Product vision, tenets, and OKRs against the 3-year plan
• Product roadmap
• Product prioritization matrix, SOPs, and tools
• Customer research and validation
• Product org structure and levels
• Team structure annual fine-tuning
• Review PM levels, leveling guidelines, job descriptions, roles, and responsibilities.
• Support recruitment and interviewing
• Review and any needed restructuring of onboarding materials and plan
• Assess gaps in positions and skill sets against business needs

Product Strategy

• Partner with your leadership team on the following:
• Self-publishing opportunities for Blurb and MagCloud
• Create a business case including differing investment levels
• Small and Medium businesses (SMB)
• Assess needs and provide recommendations against the requirements of existing SMBs
• Create goals and plans to drive the adoption of tools and services
• Photographers
• Research and provide recommendations on what are the product and services needed to support professional photographers against key segments
• Identify opportunities to create CX programs and Advisory Boards.
• Self-publishers
• SMB
• Photographers
• Enterprise
• Research and provide recommendations on what are the product and services needed to support enterprise publishers
• Distribution
• Research and provide guidance on scaling warehousing and distro to:
• Increase market share
• Level up self-publishers, small, indie, and enterprise publishers
• Provide a competitive moat

Location:

• Preference for candidates local to Seattle, but open to remote candidates as well of they can be onsite 1-2 weeks monthly.

Compensation:

Competitive base + bonus + stock