VP of Product

Location: Houston, TX (Hybrid)
Reports to: CEO
Direct Reports: Product Lead (team of PMs), Customer Success & Integration Manager (onboarding + trainers), Forward-Deployed Engineering Lead (24/7 reliability pod)
Future Scope: Build a small Product R&D “tiger team” to fast-track validated prototypes (hardware + software + AI)

The Role

Own vision → roadmap → delivery across Paladin’s stack (Knighthawk, EXT, Watchtower, Vanguard). Your mandate: ship things customers truly want, raise reliability in mission-critical environments, and turn field signal into decisive product bets. You’ll align Engineering, CS/Integration, Sales, and Ops around clear priorities, quality bars, and measurable outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Strategy & Roadmap: Define multi-year strategy and annual/quarterly roadmaps; segment use-cases (police, fire, EMS), and align pricing/packaging with Sales/Finance.
• Org Leadership: Develop leaders (PM, CS/Integration, FDE); set goals, hiring plans, and career paths; stand up the R&D tiger team with crisp entry/exit criteria.
• Product Operations: Establish discovery cadence (ride-alongs, customer councils), PRD/RFC standards, roadmap rituals, beta programs, and launch checklists.
• Execution & Quality: Gate releases with acceptance criteria, safety/reliability bars, and telemetry; ensure staged rollouts, feature flags, and rollback plans.
• Field-Driven Prioritization: Convert incidents and onboarding friction into backlog items, diagnostics, and automation; reduce repeat issues quarter over quarter.
• Onboarding & Outcomes: With CS/Integration, drive 30/60/90-day time-to-value, certification/training paths, and BVLOS/waiver readiness materials.
• Integrations: Prioritize CAD/RMS, VMS, ADS-B/UTM, storage/retention paths, and agency IT/security needs that unlock deployments.
• Go-to-Market Readiness: Coordinate Docs, enablement, serviceability/spares, and post-launch quality reviews with clear owners and timelines.
• Data & Measurement: Define golden signals/SLOs (uptime, latency, dispatch-to-air), instrument usage and reliability, and publish dashboards.
• Field Presence: Regular site visits and launch support; be visibly present with lighthouse agencies to pressure-test roadmap bets.

Success Metrics (examples)

• Adoption/Value: ≥85% of new agencies fully onboarded in ≤45 days; weekly active operators up ≥20% YoY.
• Reliability: SLO attainment ≥99.5%; MTTR down ≥30% in 2 quarters; repeat-incident rate down ≥40% YoY.
• Quality: Post-launch defect escape rate down ≥25%; rollback frequency trending to near-zero for GA releases.
• Business Impact: Improved win rate in target segments; attach rate of new modules (e.g., Vanguard features) up ≥15%; expansion in existing cities.

Qualifications

• 6+ years in Product for complex systems (hardware + software + cloud/edge); 2+ years building and leading PM orgs.
• Track record shipping field-reliable, safety-critical or high-availability products; strong partnership with Engineering/CS/Ops/Sales.
• Mastery of product ops: customer discovery → PRD/RFC → validation → staged launch → measurement → iteration.
• Fluency with reliability practices (SLOs/SLA, incident reviews, feature flags, canaries, rollbacks) and data-informed decision-making.
• Excellent executive communication; comfortable on rooftops/docks, in command centers, and in boardrooms.
• Willing to travel and work onsite as needed.

Nice to Have

• Public-safety/DFR/BVLOS exposure; ADS-B/UTM, LTE/5G, robotics/edge AI familiarity.
• Experience with telemetry/observability, GIS/video pipelines, CJIS-aligned workflows, and integrations (CAD/RMS/VMS).

Working Model

Hybrid Houston with 25–40% travel (spikes for deployments and major launches); regular ride-alongs/site visits.