VP, Product

About the Role The VP of Product at Spare is one of the most consequential roles in the company. You are not here to manage a roadmap or lead a talented team. You are here to build the full product operating system, the machine through which market insight, customer input, AI leverage, and company strategy become high-quality products and real business results. This is a role for someone who has already done it. You have led product in a comparable environment, built and owned the operating machinery, navigated real tradeoffs under real constraints, and have the business outcomes to show for it. You think like a business leader, not a feature leader. You are deeply AI-native, not in theory, but in practice. And you have the taste and judgment to consistently raise the quality bar on what Spare ships. You will report to the co-founder and COO and serve as a member of the senior leadership team. You will own the product function end-to-end: strategy, team, execution, and outcomes. This role will be based out of our Vancouver HQ and be hybrid, with Monday/Wednesday/Friday in-office. What You'll Do Build and Own the Product Operating System Design and operate the full system through which product gets made at Spare: inputs, decision-making, prioritization, delivery, and feedback loops Ensure the right information flows in from customers, sales, partner success, implementation, engineering, and data, and that it reaches the people who need it to make good decisions Define what product owns versus what it influences, and hold those boundaries with clarity Drive continuous improvement in product throughput, quality, and predictability without sacrificing strategic depth Build a product organization that gets stronger, faster, and more effective over time Set Product Strategy and Shape the Market Own Spare's product vision and multi-year roadmap, setting direction across the full platform, not just individual product areas See around corners: identify where the market is going before it is obvious and position Spare's product accordingly Connect trends in AI, transit technology, user behaviour, regulatory shifts, and competitive dynamics into a coherent, defensible product strategy Make bets before the evidence is fully assembled, and build the organizational confidence to act on them Represent Spare's product vision externally with customers, prospects, partners, and the broader industry Drive Business Outcomes Own product as a lever for revenue, retention, expansion, and competitive differentiation, not just feature delivery Lead pricing and packaging strategy in partnership with Sales, Finance, and the CEO Understand and actively manage the relationship between product decisions and COGS, implementation burden, services effort, and gross margin Ensure product roadmap investment is clearly connected to company OKRs, ARR targets, and retention goals Partner with Sales and Partner Success to ensure new capabilities land commercially and drive adoption at scale Lead AI-Native Product Development Operate as the company's senior voice on how AI changes both the product itself and how product gets built Drive adoption of agentic workflows, AI-assisted discovery, automated QA, and AI-powered internal tools across the product and engineering organization Lead the external product strategy for AI, defining where AI becomes the interface, the automation layer, the copilot, or the agent within Spare's platform Continuously re-architect product processes, surfaces, and team structures to take advantage of the AI development environment Raise the Quality Bar Set the standard for what great product and design quality looks like at Spare, and hold it consistently across everything that ships Develop strong taste and judgment within the product team through coaching, critique, and example Partner closely with design leadership to ensure design quality is a first-order input, not a finishing layer Say no to things that lower the bar, and create the organizational safety for the team to do the same Build and Develop the Product Team Recruit, develop, and retain a high-performing product organization Build clear career paths, coaching frameworks, and performance expectations for PMs at every level Create a culture of ownership, craft, and accountability, where people are energized by the work and proud of what they ship Partner with People & Talent on headcount planning, leveling, and compensation strategy for the product function What You'll Bring Proven leadership of a product organization at a comparable-stage B2B SaaS company, or full product ownership at a smaller startup where you truly had end-to-end responsibility Deep, hands-on AI fluency: you have already built agentic workflows, AI-native products, or AI-leveraged development processes, not just studied them Strong product taste and design judgment: you notice the details that others miss and you raise the quality bar consistently Demonstrated ability to connect product strategy to business outcomes: revenue, retention, pricing, COGS, and competitive positioning Evidence of building a product operating system, not just managing a team, but designing the machine that makes the team effective Forward-thinking strategic instincts: you have made product bets before they were obvious and been right more often than not Strong track record operating in imperfect, resource-constrained environments where you owned real tradeoffs Exceptional communicator and cross-functional leader: you can align engineering, sales, customer success, and the executive team around a shared product direction What We're Not Looking For Strong storytellers who are weak operators Leaders who talk about AI in abstract terms only Reactive roadmap managers rather than strategic builders Leaders who have only succeeded inside large, highly structured organizations Those who cannot clearly explain how product decisions connect to revenue, expansion, and implementation reality