VP of Product

Applecart is a high growth marketing technology company based in New York City, founded in 2013. Applecart has developed a proprietary social graph platform that uses publicly available data to map over 25 billion social relationships between more than 250 million adult Americans. Applecart’s platform helps major corporations, national nonprofit organizations, and high-profile political campaigns with their highest stakes marketing challenge: reaching hard-to-reach audiences of decision makers, spanning corporate executives, legislators, regulators, investors, members of the media, and more.

For years, marketing technology businesses have focused on solving b2c (consumer) marketing challenges (e.g. look-a-like modeling to find new customers), but the traditional pay-per-impression advertising model has left a massive opportunity unsolved for: how to market when a company’s target isn’t the average consumer, but is instead a single, senior decision maker. Applecart is the solution to this problem for some of the world’s most prominent organizations.

Quick facts about us:

• Applecart has generated over $40M in revenue to date and is growing 100%+ Y-o-Y
• Our senior leadership team includes two members of the 2021 Forbes 30 under 30 list for Marketing and Advertising, a former senior White House advisor, one of the earliest sales leaders at Google and Twitter, two of the Democratic Party’s most successful pollsters and strategists, and the senior engineer responsible for building the prediction engine that powers the world’s best known online travel booking sites.
• Our investors include global sports, entertainment and marketing giant Endeavor, KKR Co-Chairman and Co-CEO Henry Kravis, entrepreneur Chris Burch, a founder of Palantir, senior engineering leaders at Twitter and Yelp, past CEOs of Fortune 50 companies and a number of well-known venture capitalists. Endeavor CEO Ari Emanuel is a board member of the company.
• Our work has been featured on Morning Joe on MSNBC, Bloomberg and The Colbert Report, and in Axios, BusinessWeek, the Associated Press, Forbes, the Washington Post, and Politico, among many others.

About You

• You work like you have something to prove, you feel the urgency of being at a startup, you are tenacious and ever-eager to do more, to do it better, and to do it faster
• You don’t hesitate to roll up the sleeves, you are hands-on with your team, you know what’s going on at all times and why
• You keep your eye on the ball and help others to do the same, you are focused on measurable quantitative outcomes, you believe in transparency of goals and results
• You put in the effort to proactively earn and re-earn the trust of your colleagues, with special attention to the engineering and data science teams
• You thrive on constructive feedback and have a growth mindset, constantly pushing yourself to get better at your craft
• You balance work and fun; your colleagues genuinely enjoy working with you, they are motivated by you and the example you set
• You seek creative ways to get things done, but your plans are grounded in reality, you set high but achievable goals, you influence others to do the same
• You believe the right amount of process makes teams streamlined and scalable, you are comfortable balancing process adherence and process adaptation
• You are willing to contribute to any decision, but you are also willing to trust your colleagues in their areas of expertise, and can support decisions you didn’t agree with once they are made
• You are highly respected by the people you’ve previously worked with, and this is easily backed up by several professional endorsements and references

The Role

As the VP of Product, you will be responsible for establishing and getting buy-in for the product vision, strategy and roadmap, executing with our engineering team, and hitting KPIs and other target business outcomes through product development and delivery spanning the entire Applecart platform. You will lead a small team of product managers and scale the team over time through hiring, retention, mentorship, and performance management. You will also contribute to company leadership as a member of the executive team and will report directly to the company’s Co-CEO.

Responsibilities

• Scale the product / tech, team and development velocity as the company grows rapidly 
• Shape the vision and strategy for the next phase of product growth
• Lead the product management function, build and maintain a world-class team through hiring, retention, professional development, and a culture of diligence and excellence
• Be the authority on the Applecart product suite, including the underlying platform capabilities and applications of proprietary data to markets served
• Develop and maintain the internal product roadmap, linking it to clear KPIs and milestones you’ve set for the product/engineering team
• Communicate, contextualize and rationalize the roadmap to ensure cross-functional alignment 
• Refine and extend the product metrics dashboard, report on quantitative results, and use it to empower product management to regularly make data-driven decisions
• Identify and validate assumptions early and often, apply Agile methodologies to experiment, learn, and deliver iteratively; proactively reduce project risk
• Ship products continuously, push against constraints to move faster, instill a sense of urgency, ensure what’s shipped is used immediately
• Keep special projects within scope, on time, and within budget, earn trust by meeting bi-directional commitments with the engineering team and fostering product development best practices
• Become an increasingly important participant in executive-level discourse, contribute to cross-functional decisions, take accountability for business outcomes, execute executive decisions through your own work and that of your team

Qualifications

• 8+ years of intense product management experience at fast-paced software product companies (ideally some time in martech / adtech), taking products successfully from inception to market
• 3+ years leading a product management team, taking accountability for product management outcomes, with direct responsibility for hiring, retaining, and developing
• Excellent leadership skills, ability to set course and attain buy-in, giving appropriate autonomy to product managers
• Demonstrable understanding of what makes for great product design (solid UX / UI skills)
• Solid working knowledge of data-heavy products, data science possibilities and limitations, and machine learning in order to jointly brainstorm solutions with Engineering
• Firsthand familiarity and hands-on experience with databases, writing SQL queries, and/or creating dashboards/reports with advanced data analysis applications
• Deep knowledge of and belief in Agile development practices, ability to tailor product management practices to specific company needs based on stage and unique attributes of the product and markets served
• Excellent communication skills, ability to cut through the noise, to focus attention on that which matters most, to distill complex issues, and also dive into the details when needed