Vice President of Product

Nooks•Arlington, VA

9h•Hybrid

About The Position

Nooks is pioneering Classified Infrastructure-as-a-Service (CIaaS) to provide government and industry partners with the fastest, most efficient access to classified infrastructure. They are building a nationwide network of accredited classified spaces and systems to ensure the best technologies equip the nation’s warfighters. At Nooks, innovation, collaboration, and a service-first mindset are valued. This role offers a limited-time opportunity to be an equity owner in a pioneering new industry. As the first VP of Product, you will lead Nooks’ entire product organization, 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 primary responsibility is to determine how Nooks builds, packages, prices, delivers, and iterates on every offering brought to market. You will manage a team of approximately 10, with a trajectory toward 25+ within two years. You will own the product budget, drive build-vs-buy decisions, and serve as the cross-functional quality assurance checkpoint, ensuring 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. While Nooks has customers, revenue, and real facilities, the specifics of how offerings work, how they’re packaged, and how they evolve are still being defined. You are expected to arrive with a strong thesis for how product decisions should be made and build the systems, processes, and team to execute on it. This role is ideal if you are energized by the idea of defining a new product category in a startup where the products are physical spaces, human-delivered services, and software.

Requirements

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 other Nooks sites
Must be eligible to work in the United States. Candidates must be capable of maintaining eligibility up to the secret level within 45 days of hire

Nice To Haves

Experience “productizing” services — turning bespoke, manual delivery into standardized, scalable offerings
Experience at a multi-site, membership-based, or subscription-based business (coworking, hospitality, fitness, facilities management)
Experience overseeing software development teams in addition to physical/services product teams

Responsibilities

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
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
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
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