VP, Product
Candidly
Company Description
Candidly was founded in 2016 to flip the script on what it means to plan, borrow, repay, and save for college. Today, we’re the category leader with the market’s most comprehensive AI-driven student debt and savings optimization platform. We partner with hundreds of top employers, financial institutions, and retirement record keepers, positioning Candidly to serve more than 35 million Americans.
We’re already achieving incredible results — to date, we’ve helped our users get on track to eliminate more than $1.8B in student debt and pay off their loans 175,000 years quicker — and we’re seeking movers, shakers, innovators, and problem solvers to help take our mission even further.
Candidly is a high-growth, Series B startup, funded by leading investors including Altos Ventures, Aflac, Salesforce Ventures, UBS, Equal Opportunity Ventures, Impact Engine, Rethink Impact, Unum, and Cercano Management. Our fully remote, international team of 70 (and counting) includes alumni from Google, UBS, Twitter, Plaid, Prudential, LendingTree, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, and more.
Role Overview
Reporting into the Chief Data Officer, this role will be a key figure in leading cross-functional product initiatives, managing the product roadmap and representing the Product function to both clients and internal stakeholders. You will coordinate across multiple product development pods, ensuring best practices are followed across all initiatives, and own the quarterly planning process to drive successful product delivery and innovation.
Key Responsibilities
- Act as the primary product liaison for clients, partners, and internal teams ensuring clear communication and alignment on product goals and expectations.
- Act as Product’s spokesperson in client-facing interactions, understanding their needs while managing them to executable scope and actionable requirements.
- Provide mentorship and leadership to pods driving a high performance culture.
- Develop and standardize product management best practices including requirements gathering, user testing, and product roll-out processes.
- Lead product teams across multiple pods, driving collaboration, innovation and ensuring timely delivery of product milestones.
- Ensure product goals are met on time and within scope with a continual focus on improving the planning process.
- Maintain a deep understanding of market trends, customer needs, and competitive landscape to inform product strategy.
- Collaborate with engineering, sales, marketing, customer success, customer support, legal and compliance to ensure product alignment.
- Work closely with the data science team to standardize how data is integrated into decision making and product performance measurement.
- Manage the development and administration of product roadmap quarterly planning process.
- Lead and manage a team of four senior product managers, providing strategic guidance, mentorship, and support to drive the successful development and delivery of innovative products.
Qualifications
- 10+ years in product management with at least 3 - 5 years in a senior leadership role (e.g. Director or VP of Product)
- Excellent communication and interpersonal skills with experience acting as the face of product to internal and external stakeholders.
- Strong understanding of product management best practices including user research, prototyping and product analytics.
- Experience working closely with clients understanding their pain points and delivering solutions that align with market needs.
- Ability to manage complex cross-functional projects with competing priorities.
- Experience in SaaS technology.
- Familiarity with data analytics tools and methodologies to drive product decision making.
Background and EEOC
Candidly offers for employment are conditioned upon satisfactory completion of our employment screening process (including, but not limited to, a review of past employment and education records, background investigation, and/or credit check & fingerprints).
Candidly strives to foster an environment where every employee can succeed. As an Equal Opportunity Employer we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, age, non-disqualifying physical or mental disability, veteran status, or any other basis covered by applicable law. All employment is decided on the basis of qualifications, merit, and business need.