Do you want to join us on our mission to shape democracies for the digital age? Are you looking for an international and fast-paced, yet collaborative and inclusive environment to thrive in?
You have come to the right place.
CitizenLab, a global social impact scale-up with its European HQ in Brussels and presence in the US, works to make public decision-making more participatory, inclusive, and responsive. The SaaS platform is already being used by 300+ local governments and organizations in over 18 countries, facilitating two-way communication between governments and their residents. Since it was founded in 2015, CitizenLab has given 750,000+ community members a direct voice in local politics, has earned recognition as the ‘Best Social Impact Startup in Europe’, and was featured in outlets such as The New York Times and Forbes.
CitizenLab is looking for purpose-driven talent to join us on our mission to enable millions of people in cities across the globe to shape the future of their communities.
VP of Product at CitizenLab
As our VP of Product, your main objective is to drive new business growth through the definition and delivery of an exceptional product strategy. You will be a key member of our senior management team, working closely with the CEO in the day to day. We are therefore looking for a strategic product leader to oversee our product domain of soon 30 people (product managers, designers, and development teams) to build an exceptional product together.
Today, we work in four different squads, of which three functional ones (Methods, Structure, Insights) and one technical (Platform). Your challenge will be to define a winning strategy to remain best-in-class on our core engagement functionalities, while delivering revenue growth through the launch of new innovative product initiatives. Your product strategy will build on our business objectives to penetrate the US market, pursue an account expansion strategy, and accelerate towards our mission of making public decision-making more inclusive, participatory, and responsive.
Your main responsibilities will include:
1. Product Vision & Strategy
- Shape the product and technical vision of our product, in alignment with the company strategy and in close collaboration with the CEO and CTO.
- Define and communicate a portfolio-level product strategy that balances investments in new opportunities and innovations such as our Community Insights product, whilst improving our existing Engagement core.
- Guide our product positioning, pricing strategies, and strategic marketing plans across multiple markets, in collaboration with the Product Marketing Manager.
2. Product Culture & Team Development
- Reinforce a thriving product culture that leads to superior solutions and fosters innovative ideas. You create a safe-to-fail environment where people are encouraged to come up with new ideas and solutions, whilst you mitigate business risks.
- Set motivating goals for all teams and review our performance closely. Coach the different Product teams in the day-to-day and help squads deliver tangible business impact.
- Develop the product organization through your involvement in both hiring diverse teams and accelerating talent development.
3. Product Lifecycle Management
- Facilitate product development, from inception to full-scale commercialization. Connect product to go-to-market and provide guidance to reduce the time-to-impact for new product initiatives, such as our major Community Insights initiative.
- Leverage data from various sources to holistically understand and relentlessly improve product performance. Set up insightful product dashboards and reporting to seek continuous improvement.
- Support PMs in the product roadmapping and customer discovery, and CTO and Tech Leads in the release planning and development processes. Guide product decisions when facing typical trade-offs on the extent of robustness or configurability of our (lean vs. system) solutions.
What do we expect from you?
- Multiple years of experience as a Head/Director/VP of Product in a tech environment, preferably in SaaS.
- Track record of having led a product org with multiple product teams successfully.
- Technical background or extensive experience with the technical side of product development processes.
- Strong alignment with our company values of social purpose, bold thinking and bias for action, giving ownership and autonomy, and trust through transparency and vulnerability.
- Data-driven. You leverage data to the fullest to identify opportunities, review performance, and support decisions.
- Hands-on and flexible attitude. We’re a small yet fast-growing organization; you know when to do things yourself and when to delegate.
- Hungry to teach and coach. You excel at making your colleagues grow and adopt a servant leadership style.
- Exceptional communicator. You enjoy presenting strategies to large groups and getting people excited about our product plans.
- Experience working in/with multiple cultures and languages, including the United States. Your English is impeccable and it’s a plus if you speak Dutch or French.
- Working in a European time zone. The ability to relocate to Brussels is a big plus.
- A good understanding of the public sector is a big plus. Most importantly, you can demonstrate a huge appetite to improve the functioning of our governments and democracies!
An eagerness to learn, talent, and enthusiasm are more important than ticking all the boxes. If you don’t meet all of the listed requirements but are motivated and excited about the role, we want to hear from you!
What can you expect from us?
- Unlock your full potential and create social impact at scale through our open-source product. Day-to-day, we work with local government leaders across the world to help them connect with their communities.
- Become a key factor in our rapid growth as scaleup (75 employees), and contribute to our international expansion.
- Work in a fast-paced, collaborative, and supportive environment. We share a participatory culture of autonomy and ownership by everyone, not only by leadership.
- Be part of our dynamic, international team. We are as serious about our work in digital democracy as we are about having fun on our journey together.
- Enjoy an informal work vibe with open communication and full transparency on results.
- Participate in our various in-person and remote team events, inspiring team lunches, our company book club, bi-quarterly strategic town halls, and yearly global team retreats.
- Spend 10% of your time on personal projects and self-development for the long run. We’re committed to both collective and individual growth.
- Receive a competitive remuneration package (incl. management bonus) and stock options. Our benefits include 26 days PTO, a professional development budget, a collective bonus plan, your own laptop, full flexibility on working from home, and much more.
CitizenLab is committed to being a diverse and inclusive workplace. Whilst we are proud of our cultural diversity and gender parity, we are aware of the limited racial diversity in our team and are committed to making a change on this. We strongly encourage people of different backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives to apply.