Director, New Businesses

KOHO

22h • Remote

About The Position

We're looking for a Director, New Businesses to lead the product team responsible for scaling KOHO's next generation of business lines from zero to one. You will manage a team of Product Managers, each running a new business bet, and your job is to make sure every one of those bets is executed at a level that gives it a real shot at working. Reporting to the VP, Product, your job is to ensure KOHO’s new business ventures rae built the right way: tight scope, fast learning loops, clear economics, honest calls on what's working and what isn't. Success in this role is building a stable of businesses that will play major roles in KOHO’s next phase of growth.

Requirements

• 6–10+ years in product, including direct experience managing Product Managers. You've hired PMs, coached them through hard calls, and built a team — not just a roster.
• Deep 0→1 experience. You've personally taken products from nothing to real revenue, and you know what separates the bets that work from the bets that look busy. You can spot when a PM is confusing activity with progress.
• Strong operator. You think in unit economics, CAC/LTV, contribution margin, and payback. You've owned or worked closely against a P&L.
• Coach, not a hero. Your instinct is to make your team stronger, not to take the work yourself. PMs on your team get better, move faster, and make sharper calls because of how you lead them.
• High agency. You move fast and unblock yourself and your team. If a pod is stuck on a partner, a compliance question, or an exec alignment issue, you get it resolved.
• AI-native builder. You use AI tools (Claude, Cursor, etc.) in your daily work — for analysis, writing, research, prototyping — and you expect your team to do the same. You're not afraid to read an API spec or prototype something yourself.
• Clear communicator. You can write the narrative the exec team needs on Monday and run a direct, kind 1:1 with a struggling PM on Tuesday. You tell the truth about what's working and what isn't.
• Comfortable with ambiguity, intolerant of drift. You don't need a defined scope to get started, but you don't let your team stay in ambiguity longer than they should.

Nice To Haves

• Experience in Canadian fintech, regulated financial services, or adjacent consumer categories (lending, investing, insurance, crypto).
• Experience leading a new-business unit, incubation team, or a portfolio of early-stage pods inside a larger company.
• Background founding or operating at an early-stage startup.
• Familiarity with the Canadian regulatory landscape for financial products.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow a team of Product Managers. Hire, coach, and develop PMs running individual new business lines. Set the bar for how 0→1 work is done at KOHO — discovery, scoping, shipping, measuring, deciding.
• Drive execution quality across the portfolio. Each business is different, but the discipline is the same: smallest testable version, tight feedback loops, honest read of the data. You'll make sure every pod is operating that way.
• Coach PMs through ambiguity. 0→1 work breaks PMs who are used to a defined backlog. You'll help them build the muscle for first-principles scoping, user discovery, partner conversations, and calling the go/no-go moments.
• Own the operating cadence. Build the rhythm that keeps multiple new business lines accountable without crushing their speed — review cadences, experiment governance, unit economics reporting, go/no-go gates.
• Unblock pods across the org. New businesses run into every seam in the company: compliance, finance, partnerships, legal, ops. You'll foresee blockers and keep the trains on time across multiple launches.
• Translate between pods and the executive team. Synthesize progress across the portfolio for the CEO and exec team. Make the case for continued investment, a pivot, or a shutdown — with data behind it.
• Set the standard for what "scaling" looks like. Once a new business finds signal, you'll lead the handoff or the scale-up — team shape, metric targets, operating model — so the business has a credible path from first revenue to real scale.

Benefits

• work-life integration, not just work-life balance. That means asynchronous collaboration, flexible hours, and a remote-first setup built around autonomy and high trust.
• dedicated to providing pay transparency to all candidates.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director
• Education Level: No Education Listed