VP, Product

The VP of Product at Spare is one of the most consequential roles in the company. You are not here to manage a roadmap or lead a talented team. You are here to build the full product operating system, the machine through which market insight, customer input, AI leverage, and company strategy become high-quality products and real business results.

This is a role for someone who has already done it. You have led product in a comparable environment, built and owned the operating machinery, navigated real tradeoffs under real constraints, and have the business outcomes to show for it. You think like a business leader, not a feature leader. You are deeply AI-native, not in theory, but in practice. And you have the taste and judgment to consistently raise the quality bar on what Spare ships.

You will report to the co-founder and COO and serve as a member of the senior leadership team. You will own the product function end-to-end: strategy, team, execution, and outcomes.
This role will be based out of our Vancouver HQ and be hybrid, with Monday/Wednesday/Friday in-office.

• Design and operate the full system through which product gets made at Spare: inputs, decision-making, prioritization, delivery, and feedback loops

• Ensure the right information flows in from customers, sales, partner success, implementation, engineering, and data, and that it reaches the people who need it to make good decisions

• Define what product owns versus what it influences, and hold those boundaries with clarity

• Drive continuous improvement in product throughput, quality, and predictability without sacrificing strategic depth

• Build a product organization that gets stronger, faster, and more effective over time

• Own Spare's product vision and multi-year roadmap, setting direction across the full platform, not just individual product areas

• See around corners: identify where the market is going before it is obvious and position Spare's product accordingly

• Connect trends in AI, transit technology, user behaviour, regulatory shifts, and competitive dynamics into a coherent, defensible product strategy

• Make bets before the evidence is fully assembled, and build the organizational confidence to act on them

• Represent Spare's product vision externally with customers, prospects, partners, and the broader industry

• Own product as a lever for revenue, retention, expansion, and competitive differentiation, not just feature delivery

• Lead pricing and packaging strategy in partnership with Sales, Finance, and the CEO

• Understand and actively manage the relationship between product decisions and COGS, implementation burden, services effort, and gross margin

• Ensure product roadmap investment is clearly connected to company OKRs, ARR targets, and retention goals

• Partner with Sales and Partner Success to ensure new capabilities land commercially and drive adoption at scale

• Operate as the company's senior voice on how AI changes both the product itself and how product gets built

• Drive adoption of agentic workflows, AI-assisted discovery, automated QA, and AI-powered internal tools across the product and engineering organization

• Lead the external product strategy for AI, defining where AI becomes the interface, the automation layer, the copilot, or the agent within Spare's platform

• Continuously re-architect product processes, surfaces, and team structures to take advantage of the AI development environment

• Set the standard for what great product and design quality looks like at Spare, and hold it consistently across everything that ships

• Develop strong taste and judgment within the product team through coaching, critique, and example

• Partner closely with design leadership to ensure design quality is a first-order input, not a finishing layer

• Say no to things that lower the bar, and create the organizational safety for the team to do the same

• Recruit, develop, and retain a high-performing product organization

• Build clear career paths, coaching frameworks, and performance expectations for PMs at every level

• Create a culture of ownership, craft, and accountability, where people are energized by the work and proud of what they ship

• Partner with People & Talent on headcount planning, leveling, and compensation strategy for the product function

• Proven leadership of a product organization at a comparable-stage B2B SaaS company, or full product ownership at a smaller startup where you truly had end-to-end responsibility

• Deep, hands-on AI fluency: you have already built agentic workflows, AI-native products, or AI-leveraged development processes, not just studied them

• Strong product taste and design judgment: you notice the details that others miss and you raise the quality bar consistently

• Demonstrated ability to connect product strategy to business outcomes: revenue, retention, pricing, COGS, and competitive positioning

• Evidence of building a product operating system, not just managing a team, but designing the machine that makes the team effective

• Forward-thinking strategic instincts: you have made product bets before they were obvious and been right more often than not

• Strong track record operating in imperfect, resource-constrained environments where you owned real tradeoffs

• Exceptional communicator and cross-functional leader: you can align engineering, sales, customer success, and the executive team around a shared product direction

• Strong storytellers who are weak operators

• Leaders who talk about AI in abstract terms only

• Reactive roadmap managers rather than strategic builders

• Leaders who have only succeeded inside large, highly structured organizations

• Those who cannot clearly explain how product decisions connect to revenue, expansion, and implementation reality