Director of Product Development

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Meet our client

Our Client is CONFIDENTIAL

About the role

We are looking for a Director of Product Development, a senior leader responsible for defining what gets built, when, and why. This person owns the product roadmap, leads the product development function, and serves as the connective tissue between executive strategy, engineering execution, clinical and regulatory requirements, and customer outcomes.

Your responsibilities:

• Set the 12–18 month product roadmap in collaboration with Marketing and consumers insights; align it to company OKRs and present it quarterly to the executive team
• Lead the product development team — direct report(s) at the manager level encompassing engineering, design, and clinical/regulatory partners — including the existing engineering team, which reports to the Director
• Manage and grow the existing engineering team: align on technical direction with the engineering lead, support the engineers' ownership and independent release decisions, run lightweight process that fits a small team, and be the escalation point for product/engineering trade-offs.
• Own the build/buy/partner decision for new product capabilities; defend the recommendation with cost, time-to-market and risk analysis in partnership with Finance and Marketing.
• Steward cross-functional alignment with Clinical/Medical requirements, Regulatory, Marketing and Sales
• Approve all software releases against quality, security (SOC 2, HIPAA where applicable) and clinical-safetygates
• Own the product discovery process with Marketing — customer research, problem definition, hypothesis testing — and ensure no major feature ships without it
• Hire, develop, and (when necessary) exit product managers; build the team's career framework and review cadence
• Sponsor the teams AI-and-tooling roadmap (AI in discovery, AI features in the product itself, agentic workflows for internal ops)
• Fluent in both B2B and B2C product motions — has developed product in both, or has led a strategic shiftinto the other. Can articulate how the product, pricing, GTM and metric set change between them
• Has driven product innovation as a discipline — owns a documented innovation practice (horizonplanning, opportunity identification, prototyping cadence, kill criteria) and can point to one bet that paid
  off and one that didn't, and what was learned from each
• Consumer research at depth — has personally led or commissioned generative research (ethnography,jobs-to-be-done interviews, diary studies, in-context observation) and translated findings into product
  strategy. Knows the difference between consumer research, usability testing, and survey research, and
  when to use which
• Continuous discovery practice in active use — runs an opportunity-solution tree, maintains a weekly customer-interview cadence across the team, and has hypotheses tracked to measured outcomes (Teresa Torres model or equivalent)
• 10+ years in product management or product development with 4+ years leading product teams of 3+ direct reports
• Has owned the end-to-end roadmap for at least one software product that generated $5M+ in ARR or served 25K+ active users — must be able to walk through the discovery, the build, and the outcome numbers
• Has shipped software in BOTH a regulated health context (HIPAA at minimum; FDA 510(k), SaMD/Software-as-a-Medical-Device, or HITRUST a strong plus) AND a pure-software/SaaS context — or one of them at depth with credible exposure to the other
• Hands-on with modern product practices: continuous discovery, opportunity-solution trees, JTBD, OKR- driven roadmapping, dual-track agile
• Has owned a product P&L or a product line's gross-margin contribution for 2+ consecutive years and reported the result to executives
• Has hired and exited product managers — including making a wrong hire and acting on it within 90 days
• Fluent reading API contracts, system architecture diagrams and clinical workflow diagrams; able to challenge engineering and clinical SMEs constructively without being one
• Has presented product strategy to a CEO, board or clinical advisory board at least quarterly for 2+ years
• Has led or directly managed an existing engineering team (in-house or distributed) as a product leader — knows how to set direction and hold the product/engineering balance without being the engineering manager day-to-day, partnering with an engineering lead on architecture and delivery.
• Has worked directly with an engineering team day-to-day (not through a layer) — can partner with engineers on feasibility, sprint planning and release, and is comfortable being challenged on scope and estimates.

About You

• Have 10+ years of experience in Product Management or Product Development, including 4+ years leading high-performing product teams.
• Equally comfortable operating in regulated health-tech environments and fast-paced SaaS organizations, balancing compliance, customer needs, and business outcomes.
• Haveave a strong product discovery mindset, leveraging customer research, experimentation, and data to drive strategic product decisions.
• Strategic and influential leader who can align executives, engineers, clinical stakeholders, and commercial teams around a shared product vision.

Capabilities

• Direct experience with FDA SaMD pathway and post-market surveillance
• Has developed features into a regulated context
• Holds the build-vs-buy-vs-partner line under pressure — can defend a decision to NOT build a feature witha stronger argument than the people asking for it, and brings the same rigor to deciding when to buy orpartner
• Has built a product discovery practice from scratch — interviews per quarter cadence, opportunity-solution trees in active use, hypotheses tracked to outcomes — and shows it operating today
• Pattern-matches between health-tech rigor (substantiation, audit trails, clinical validation) and softwarespeed (rapid iteration, A/B testing, telemetry) — knows which constraint applies to which decision and
  never confuses them