Senior Director of Product

How would you like to be the absolute product owner of an app that is early on its growth curve yet already generates >€100MM (ARR) with 100% YoY growth? How would you like to innovate within one of the world’s largest categories that still remained unclaimed? Do you like waking up in the morning knowing that today you can make millions of people feel better? You’ll have total cross-functional authority to innovate the user experience in service of retention and LTV. You’ll have a handful of direct reports who you select and you’ll have absolute control over your 50+ person app tribe. The board, CEO , CPO and wider company will look to you as the final authority on the product you own.

If that sounds like it could be the job of your dreams, keep reading.

Background

Welltech operates a suite of fitness and wellness products including YogaGo, MuscleBooster, Walkfit and more. Collectively the launched apps generate hundreds of millions (€) in ARR. We have 180 full-time engineers and a total headcount of 800.

The company has been profitable since 2018 and is now seeing overall 100%+ YoY revenue growth. There are few, if any, pure consumer app companies in existence that are scaling at our pace.

The marketing side of Welltech is a well-oiled machine that generates millions of installs per month and is led by the industry’s top growth and marketing talents. We have a proven ability to acquire users and monetize, world-wide, we now must increase LTV through better retention earned through the delivery of exceptional user experiences across all of our apps.

Our first order objective on this front is to hire a truly world-class product leadership team and empower them to imagine & build a sector redefining experience across all of our apps. We have the user acquisition numbers and budget to accomplish this, now we need the kind of leaders who can imagine the most loved exercise apps ever built.

Who we seek

• You are a fully-formed cross-functional product leader who is a product builder at heart.

• You have managed successful consumer products and teams. You may have been the founder of a successful product (perhaps you’ve raised capital), you may have been a VP+ at a mass market consumer digital product company, you may have been a CPO or CEO previously. All are formative experiences that shape your approach and your desire to return to pure product obsession and impact people’s lives.

• Given equal compensation, you’d rather own a product and direct the work of the cross-functional app ‘tribe’ than manage the personnel of a functional area inside a company.

• This is the ideal job in the eyes of a person who has a variety of career paths open to them, including VP or higher. The right person for this job has done many things, including people management, and is choosing this job consciously because it offers what they really want to be doing professionally, not simply because it is another rung on the PM ladder.

• As a builder, your focus on concrete metrics and clarity of purpose, thought, and action inspires the people around you to perform at an ever higher level.

About the role

• You are the directly-responsible-person for the achievement of the strategic objective defined for your app – user engagement and resulting retained revenue. 

• This is a very senior role within the org hierarchy. We are making a bet on your individual ability to generate forward momentum and will empower you fully. The board, CEO, and CxOs regard you as the owner, expert, and final decision maker when it comes to the app you own.

• You are on a mission to build and operate a winning product, you know how to do it, and anyone slowing that mission will want to either find a way to help, or get out of the way. You inspire others through purpose of mission, clarity of thought, and tough fairness in treatment of colleagues. When it comes to resources, leadership is committed to making sure that the only thing that will slow you down is your own imagination 

• You are compelling in front of CxOs, the board, the press, and in front of the whole company at all hands events.

• We expect you to deploy the full spectrum of product innovation tradecraft in pursuit of impact.

• Through the application of consumer science fundamentals and sound product development practices, you have a rare and tremendous opportunity to generate delight for millions of users and manifest a many-fold multiplication of gross revenue.

• Fundamentally, your role will be to lead up-down-left-and-right in order to manifest the innovation, culture, and processes that result in continual improvement to user retention and LTV in your app.

Your ‘tribe’

Your cross-functional app team consists primarily of dotted-line collaborators whose work you steer and have final authority to direct. You may, at your option, have PMs who report directly to you. You have the authority to dismiss people from your product tribe through discussion with line-report managers.

Each app tribe includes the following functions:

• Product

  • Product management

  • Product design (ux, ix, viz)

  • User research

  • Experience assurance (think QA but tied to designers more than engineers)

• Engineering

• Data analysis

• Marketing

• Growth / PMM / Perf. Marketing

• Content (eg fitness activities developed in collaboration with experts)

• Market research

Time breakdown

As a window into how we see this role, here’s a rough breakdown of expected time expenditure, though we trust you’ll rebalance however appropriate to achieve sustained impact.

• Observation & Hypothesis: 40% user research, quant data analysis, market research, and hypothesis development.

• Product Development: 40% leading UXD, content, and eng on experiment implementation.

• Evangelism: 10% communicating up and out about the work of the app team.

• App Quality Hygiene: 5% backlog grooming, bug triage, alignment with CX.  

• PD Leadership Alignment: 4% with the other app owners and eng leadership on ways-of-working, oiling-the-machine.

• Other: <1%

  • Hiring and anything else HR related (eg 360 reviews, 15-5, HRBP syncs, etc)

  • Legal / compliance

  • Consensus building / buy-in solicitation

Profile

Hard Requirements

• Made a massive direct impact on a large scale D2C app in terms of usage and user retention.

• Lead PM for 2+ years at a mass market consumer digital D2C product company.

• Been a product exec (VP/CPO) at a company you didn’t start yourself.

• Evidence of imagination, you’ve been closely involved in the creation/pivot of a product into an innovative success. 

• Multiple years at the wheel of cross-functional product development teams.

Nice-to-have

• Close involvement in the innovation of a product that redefined a space (Peloton, Amazon, Netflix, …)

• Founded one or more product companies.

• Experience grappling with user psychology around self-improvement (fitness, education, mindfulness, nutrition, …)