Vice President of Product

ABOUT NOOKS Are you seeking an exciting and unique opportunity to grow and support our national security? As a startup, we are offering a limited-time opportunity to be an equity owner in a pioneering new industry. Nooks is pioneering Classified Infrastructure-as-a-Service (CIaaS) to provide government and industry partners with the fastest, most efficient access to classified infrastructure. We are building a nationwide network of accredited classified spaces and systems, ensuring that the best technologies equip our nation’s warfighters. At Nooks, we value innovation, collaboration, and a service-first mindset. ABOUT THE ROLE: You will lead Nooks’ entire product organization as our first VP of Product, reporting directly to the CEO. You will own three product lines — Physical, Digital, and Expeditionary — plus the software engineering team that serves all three. Your job is to determine how we build, package, price, deliver, and iterate on every offering Nooks brings to market. You will manage a team of approximately 10 today, including Product Directors for each vertical, with a trajectory toward 25+ within two years. You own the product budget, drive build-vs-buy decisions, and serve as the cross-functional quality assurance checkpoint ensuring our products operate as designed once launched. This is a building role at a company where most of the product playbook hasn’t been written yet. We have customers, revenue, and real facilities — but the specifics of how offerings work, how they’re packaged, and how they evolve are still being figured out. You’ll arrive with a strong thesis for how product decisions should be made, and you’ll build the systems, processes, and team to execute on it. If the idea of defining a new product category in a startup where the products are physical spaces, human-delivered services, and software energizes you, this is the role. KEY RESPONSIBILITIES: Product Strategy & Portfolio Management Define and maintain the product roadmap across Physical, Digital, and Expeditionary, aligning priorities with customer demand signals from Growth and financial constraints from Finance Own and evolve the Offerings Development Process — the gated framework governing how new products move from opportunity identification through feasibility, piloting, refinement, and launch Make portfolio-level prioritization decisions: what to build next, what to eliminate, what to iterate, and what to scale — and defend those decisions with evidence Establish and track product performance metrics post-launch, triggering iteration or sunset decisions based on revenue, margin, customer satisfaction, and operational burden Product Development & Delivery Lead the Product Directors for  Physical, Digital, and Expeditionary in translating customer needs into specific, deliverable product designs — from access policies and amenity packages to service delivery models and pricing structures Drive build-vs-buy decisions for product tooling and delivery infrastructure, owning vendor relationships where external solutions are selected Design and run MVP/pilot programs with real customers, structuring success metrics, feedback mechanisms, and clear go/no-go decision criteria Cross-Functional Quality Assurance Serve as the post-launch quality checkpoint: ensure that every product operates as designed, meets the standards Nooks committed to, and delivers the customer experience that was promised Partner with Operations to identify and resolve delivery gaps, operational bottlenecks, and quality issues that emerge after launch Establish feedback loops between customer-facing teams (Growth, Operations) and the product organization to drive continuous improvement Team & Process Building Build, mentor, and scale the product team from approximately 10 to 25+ people over the next two years, including hiring Product Managers, designers, and software engineers Establish the product management discipline at Nooks: processes, tools, cadences, and cultural norms for how product work gets done Develop and codify Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for product delivery, ensuring offerings can be replicated consistently across Nooks sites THE SKILLSET: 10+ years of progressive product management experience, including at least 3 years leading a product team Demonstrated experience building and launching products that include a physical or services component — not exclusively software/SaaS Experience in a startup or high-growth environment where you built product processes and teams from early stages Track record of managing a product budget and making build-vs-buy decisions with financial accountability Ability to articulate a clear product thesis: how you identify opportunities, prioritize investments, and manage a product portfolio over time Location- National Landing (Arlington, VA). Expectation of 4-days onsite per week, with approximately 25% travel to