Vice President, Product

Meet Instinct

Instinct Science is at the forefront of veterinary innovation, comprised of world-class tools that have served our industry for decades: easy-to-use veterinary practice software (Instinct EMR), an essential resource for expanding your knowledge and skills (Clinician’s Brief), clinical and pharmaceutical decision support (Standards of Care & Plumb’s), and an AI scribing platform (ScribbleVet). Combined, Instinct Science offers an ecosystem that veterinarians rely on for every aspect and stage of their careers.

At Instinct Science, we believe in leading with compassion. Our team, our customers, and their patients and clients are the foundation of everything we do. Our culture is guided by our U.C.A.R.E. values, which serve as our daily compass:

• Urgency : We move with speed because our mission is too important to wait. Urgency means prioritizing high-impact work, making timely decisions, and being highly responsive to our customers, partners, and fellow employees.
• Customer First: We’re our customers’ (and this profession’s) biggest fans. We put them first and obsess over helping them solve their challenges.
• Act with Grace, Not Teeth: We treat people with kindness, humor, humility, and assume good intent. We ask what we would want if we were in the other person’s shoes.
• Right Things, Right Reasons: We take ownership of all tasks, big and small. When we make mistakes, we own them, fix them quickly, and learn.
• Excellence is in our DNA: We hold ourselves and each other to high standards because our work is too important to do otherwise.

A Sneak Peek of Your Role  

This job, and the team at Instinct, is remote.

At Instinct, we build the clinical software that veterinary teams rely on to deliver better care every day. The Vice President, Product is the operational leader of our product organization and a force multiplier on the executive team. In this role, you partner with the Chief Product & Technology Officer and the broader leadership team to translate Instinct’s strategy into a roadmap, a portfolio, and a go-to-market motion that wins.

Strategy isn’t handed down or written in isolation here. You help shape it, bringing market intelligence, customer truth, and commercial instinct into the conversation, and you own turning it into outcomes. You lead, coach, and grow the product management and user research functions across a multi-product portfolio spanning ER/Specialty, General Practice, and Consolidator segments, as well as our emerging AI-native experiences. Partnership with Sales, Marketing, and Customer Experience shapes how we package, position, and bring our products to market. Partnership with Design and Engineering is how we ship products customers love.

If leading a modern product organization at a category-leading vertical SaaS company in the AI era sounds like the next chapter you want to write, this is the role for you.

What You’ll Do ‍

Strategy & Portfolio (in partnership with the CPTO and exec team)

• Co-create product strategy with the CPTO and exec team. Your contribution is market insight, customer evidence, and competitive intelligence; your accountability is translating that strategy into a coherent multi-product roadmap.
• Drive prioritization across investment themes, balancing near-term revenue and retention impact with the long-term bets that define our moat.
• Sequence the portfolio across segments (ER/Specialty, GP, Consolidators) and across our standalone and bundled product lines, so investment, sequencing, and dependencies are clear to everyone running against them.
• Own the product operating budget and headcount plan. Make investment trade-offs proactively, with data, and in service of the strategy.

Go-to-Market, Packaging & Monetization

• Partner with Sales and Marketing to shape packaging and SKU architecture: how features bundle into tiers, editions, and offerings that map cleanly to customer segments and buying motions.
• Contribute to monetization alongside Sales, Marketing, Finance, and the CPTO, supplying value metrics, segment fit, and willingness-to-pay signals as inputs to executive pricing decisions.
• Lead launches with Marketing, Sales, and Customer Experience. Positioning, messaging, enablement, and adoption mechanics all matter, and the bar is a launch that actually moves the business.
• Support Sales leadership on commercial fit: strategic-account deal support, segment plays, and the productization of new market opportunities.

Product & Research Org Leadership

• Lead, coach, and grow the product management and user research teams. Hire exceptional talent, develop the people we have, and set a high bar for craft, judgment, and outcomes.
• Run the operating system of the product org: planning cadence, prioritization rituals, discovery and delivery rigor, written communication standards, and the connective tissue with Design and Engineering.
• Set the craft bar for how we frame trade-offs, shape initiatives, and measure success, and evolve the practice in an AI-forward environment.
• Mature the research function into a real strategic asset, with generative discovery, evaluative testing, and longitudinal customer insight that feeds both product decisions and exec-level customer narrative.
• Own performance management and career development, building the leveling, feedback, and growth systems that retain great talent.

Customers, Discovery & Influence

• Lead rigorous customer discovery: structured interviews, in-clinic time, and decisions grounded in evidence. We treat discovery as an ongoing discipline, not a research sprint that happens before a launch.
• Spend real time with customers, clinical stakeholders, and prospects across ER/Specialty hospitals, GP practices, and Consolidator/DSO leadership. Pattern recognition across segments is one of the most valuable things you can produce.
• Track the competitive landscape as a living input that shapes roadmap, positioning, and packaging decisions in real time, rather than something we revisit once a quarter.
• Align cross-functional partners without direct authority across Engineering, Sales, Marketing, Customer Experience, and Finance. Most of the work happens through influence, and the role is built for someone who is good at it.
• Represent product externally with the executives, company, board of directors, customers, prospects, analysts, and at industry events. We need a credible, compelling voice for where Instinct is going and why.
• Own outcomes, not outputs. Retention, expansion, activation, win rate, and product-driven NRR are the scoreboard. Help define how the org measures itself, and report against it candidly.

Who You Are ‍

• Must Haves:
  • 10+ years in product management, with 5+ years leading product organizations at the Senior Director or VP level.
  • A track record of scaling product teams through meaningful growth, M&A, or transformation, ideally in vertical SaaS, clinical, healthcare, or another specialized domain.
  • Demonstrated experience shipping AI-native or AI-enhanced products in a commercial SaaS context, where AI is central to user value rather than a backend implementation detail.
  • Multi-product portfolio experience. You have managed prioritization, sequencing, and trade-offs across more than one product line or segment.
  • Demonstrated impact on commercial outcomes: packaging and monetization decisions you helped shape, launches that moved the business, GTM partnerships that paid off.
  • Experience building or modernizing a user research function into a strategic asset.
  • Owned a product budget and made real investment trade-offs against business outcomes.
  • Genuine partnership with GTM functions (Sales, Marketing, Customer Success) and a feel for how product decisions land in the field.
  • Excellent written and verbal communication. You can write a one-pager that aligns an exec team and walk a customer through a product vision with equal ease.
  • Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience that demonstrates the same caliber of thinking. An advanced degree is welcome but not expected.

How Instinct will Care about YOU

• We offer a supportive and caring work environment.
• We are transparent, open, honest, and empathic, both internally and externally.
• We pay our team well.
• We offer medical, dental and vision benefits and 401K with match.
• We give our team owner-like flexibility over work and time-off, including time to innovate and Flow State Fridays.
• We offer a generous stipend that can be used for almost anything to allow you to bring your best self to work.
• We provide all-expense-paid time throughout the year together, including at our annual retreat.

The compensation range for this role is $180,000 - $250,000. Actual compensation will be determined through a variety of factors including the candidate's skills, qualifications, and experience.

Instinct is an equal opportunity employer committed to equality and providing a pleasant work environment free from harassment or discrimination in any form. All employees will be treated equally without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, family or parental status, national origin, ancestry, veteran, or disability status.

If you require accommodations throughout any part of the pre-employment process, please contact our People team at View email address on click.appcast.io