Vice President, Product

Company Description

Novo is a venture-backed fintech that simplifies banking for small businesses. Since our Fall 2018 beta launch, we've expanded offerings from free checking accounts and debit cards to lending products, business tools (invoices, bookkeeping, and more), and integrations.

Today, Novo is a powerfully simple banking platform that serves over 250,000 small businesses. In addition to providing smart tools built for entrepreneurs to better run and grow their businesses, Novo has processed billions in transactions in partnership with a number of established banking partners.

Our vision is to be the go-to platform serving small businesses – from launch to everyday – so business owners can focus on growing, while Novo provides seamless money movement, money storage, and access to capital. We'd like to look back 5–10 years from now and know that we helped new generations of small businesses succeed because of the work we did at Novo.

Novo raised $170 million in venture capital and is backed by leading investors, including Stripes, Valar Ventures, Crosslink Capital, and Notable Capital (formerly GGV). Learn more at https://www.novo.co.

Role Description

Novo is seeking a highly experienced and motivated product leader to own and drive the strategy, roadmap, and execution of our product portfolio. This role is critical to defining what we build and why, ensuring that every product decision advances our mission of simplifying banking for small businesses while supporting our rapidly expanding customer base and business operations. The ideal candidate is a hands-on leader who can set a compelling product vision, translate it into a prioritized roadmap, harness AI both to reimagine the customer experience and to sharpen how the product team works, and partner closely with engineering, design, operations, and our banking partners to ship products that customers love within a dynamic, regulated fintech environment.

Responsibilities

Product Vision & Strategy

• Define and champion a clear, differentiated product vision and multi-quarter strategy aligned with Novo's mission and business goals.

• Translate market opportunities, customer needs, and competitive dynamics into a coherent product narrative and prioritized roadmap.

• Make rigorous, evidence-based prioritization decisions, balancing customer value, business impact, and technical investment.

• Partner with the executive team to shape company strategy and represent the voice of the product in board and investor conversations.

Roadmap & Execution

• Own the end-to-end product roadmap across core banking, money movement, card products, lending, and business tools, driving initiatives from concept to launch.

• Establish and run a healthy product development process, ensuring timely delivery, clear scope, and successful outcomes.

• Drive key initiatives spanning activation and onboarding, card and interchange products, payments and money-movement rails, platform and API surface area, and continued simplification of the core app experience.

• Define success metrics for every initiative and hold the organization accountable to outcomes, not just output.

Team Leadership & Development

• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of product managers, fostering a culture of collaboration, customer obsession, continuous improvement, and high ownership.

• Set clear expectations, career paths, and performance standards; recruit and retain top product talent.

• Establish product craft, rituals, and best practices that scale with the organization.

Cross-Functional Partnership

• Partner closely with Engineering and Design leadership to ensure tight alignment on what gets built, how, and when.

• Collaborate with Operations, Risk, Compliance, and Legal to navigate the regulatory requirements inherent to a fintech company and ship products responsibly.

• Manage relationships and joint roadmaps with banking partners and key third-party providers.

• Communicate effectively with technical and non-technical stakeholders, from individual contributors to the executive team and board.

AI Product Strategy

• Define how AI shapes Novo's product, identifying where AI and ML can meaningfully improve the small business banking experience — from smarter money movement and insights to onboarding, support, and automation of financial workflows.

• Set the vision for AI-native features and build the discovery and evaluation practices needed to validate them, distinguishing durable customer value from hype before significant investment.

• Partner with Engineering, Data, Risk, Compliance, and Legal to ensure AI-powered features meet the security, privacy, fairness, transparency, and regulatory bar required in financial services.

• Champion the use of AI within the product organization itself — in research synthesis, prototyping, analysis, and documentation — to raise the team's speed and quality.

• Stay abreast of the rapidly evolving AI landscape and apply informed judgment to make deliberate build-vs-buy decisions on models, tooling, and partners.

Customer & Market Insight

• Develop deep, first-hand understanding of small business owners and their financial workflows through research, data, and direct customer contact.

• Build a continuous discovery practice that surfaces problems worth solving and validates solutions before significant investment.

• Monitor market, competitor, and regulatory trends, recommending where Novo should lead, fast-follow, or partner.

Growth & Metrics

• Own the metrics that matter for the product portfolio, including activation, engagement, retention, and share-of-wallet.

• Favor rigorous, cohort-based analysis over surface-level correlation when evaluating product impact and informing investment decisions.

• Partner with Data and Analytics to build the instrumentation and dashboards needed to measure and improve product performance.

Strategic Planning & Budgeting

• Contribute to strategic planning for future product investments and the broader technology roadmap.

• Help define resourcing and investment trade-offs, optimizing for impact while ensuring teams have what they need to deliver.

Minimum Qualifications

• 10–15+ years of progressive experience in product management, with at least 3–5 years in a senior product leadership role (preferably in fintech, financial services, or banking).

• Demonstrable track record of defining product strategy and shipping successful, customer-facing products at scale in a regulated environment.

• Strong understanding of money movement, payments, card and interchange economics, lending, or related financial products.

• Deep fluency with data: experienced in defining metrics, designing experiments, and using rigorous analysis to drive decisions.

• Proven ability to lead and motivate product teams, manage complex cross-functional initiatives, and communicate effectively with technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Experience partnering with Engineering, Design, Compliance, and external partners to deliver products within regulatory constraints.

• Experience defining AI product strategy and/or shipping AI- or ML-powered features, with sound judgment about where AI delivers real customer value and where it introduces risk, plus comfort using AI tools to accelerate the product team's own work.

• Strong product judgment, a bias toward action, and a proactive approach to identifying and solving customer and business problems.

• Ability to thrive in a fast-paced, evolving startup environment.

• Bachelor's degree required; advanced degree (MBA or technical Master's) preferred.