VP of Product

 

VP of Product 

Greenplaces

Title: VP of Product

Location:  Raleigh, NC  (Hybrid preferred; remote considered)

Reports to: CEO 

Start date: October 1st 

About Greenplaces

Greenplaces helps suppliers become better businesses and prove it. We pair dedicated experts with AI-powered software to deliver the work enterprise buyers demand, without the cost and drag of traditional consulting. Greenplaces helps clients reduce risk and stay compliant by supporting their environmental reporting ( such as CDP, Ecovadis, SBTi, B Corp etc)  and Trust Services (SOC2 and AI Governance). 

Headquartered in Raleigh, NC, we partner with organizations that want sustainability to be a real business function rather than a side initiative. We are a certified B Corp and build our product and culture around accountability, transparency, and long term environmental impact.

 

About the role

Greenplaces is looking for a VP of Product to build and lead the product organization from a lean, high-stakes starting point. You'll own the roadmap, turn what we build into something the market understands and buys, put real measurement behind every launch, and act as the connective tissue between engineering, design, sales, and customer success. You'll report to the CEO and lead a team of about 12, directly managing 2 product team members and the Director of Engineering, who leads the rest of the engineering team.

What you'll own

• Product vision & strategy: set the product direction informed by direct customer engagement, competitive and market research, and company goals, and bring evidence-backed proposals (options, cost, tradeoffs) to leadership and the board.
• Roadmap ownership: own the sequencing and prioritization calls across concurrent launches and a growing framework portfolio, make a written case for what we're not doing and why, and hold the line on settled decisions.
• Metrics & instrumentation: define the outcome before work starts, build instrumentation into every launch's scope, and report the handful of numbers that show whether the product is actually working.
• Product marketing & GTM enablement: own positioning, pricing input, launch communication, the external roadmap, and sales enablement material; make sure sales can tell the product story on day one of every release.
• Engineering leadership: directly oversee the Director of Engineering and, through them, the wider engineering team; you don't need to be deeply hands-on technical yourself (the Director brings that depth), but you need enough fluency to hold them accountable, make informed platform calls, and negotiate scope against committed dates.
• Discovery: ultimately own the discovery process, pulling in CX, sales, or others as needed rather than running every call personally.
• Customer & competitive insight: partner with CX and Sales day to day; set what the org needs to learn, join discovery and prospect calls, and turn what comes back into a current, written view of the market and competitors.
• Team building: grow and coach a product & engineering organization of about 12 people, hire and mentor product managers, and give the team members already here their first real mentorship in the craft.
• Cross-functional & board communication: explain the same roadmap and tradeoffs credibly to engineers, executives, the board, and customers, and keep decisions and known issues documented somewhere the whole company can find them.
• Internal tooling & cost to serve: partner with the subject-matter-expert bench as a primary internal user and help reduce their cost to serve (stretch responsibility, scope to be confirmed).

What you bring

• 10+ years of product leadership experience, with a track record of taking products from ideation through discovery, launch, and iteration. The VP title itself isn't required; a former Director of Product or similar scope is a great fit.
• Experience at startup or high-growth scale-up companies (roughly Series A to C, or sub-150 to 300 person orgs), hands-on and resourced lean, not exclusively large, heavily-staffed product organizations.
• Comfortable enough with technical concepts to manage a strong Director of Engineering and make informed platform/architecture calls; deep hands-on engineering experience is a plus, not required.
• Direct experience owning product marketing, positioning, and sales enablement, not just internal backlog work.
• Experience building analytics and success metrics from nothing, and using them to drive decisions.
• B2B SaaS background required; experience in a regulated or compliance-driven category (GRC, audit, fintech, healthcare, or similar) is a strong plus. Sustainability/ESG/carbon-accounting expertise is a nice-to-have, not a requirement; our subject-matter experts own that depth.
• Experience running discovery, market research, and agile/scrum-based project management.
• Experience hiring, growing, and coaching product teams, including from a very small starting headcount.
• Comfort using AI tools to move and build faster.
• Based in the Raleigh, NC area and comfortable with a hybrid schedule is preferred; strong remote candidates across the U.S. will be considered.

How you work

• Clear, direct, and consistent across audiences: you'd explain the same tradeoff to an engineer and to the board without changing the substance but adjusting for the audience. .
• Decisive: comfortable making the call without consensus, documenting the reasoning, and committing, including to calls that don't go your way.
• Low ego, high agency: willing to do unglamorous work, and secure enough to change your mind when someone has a better argument.
• Non-defensive about competitors and gaps: you can name what we do worse than the market and go get the evidence that would change your mind.
• Steady under pressure, with genuine curiosity about customers and teammates.