Director of Product, Core Business

Role Description

Zipline’s core product is the engine behind how the world’s best retailers operate their frontline, and it’s evolving fast. As we build toward an AI-first frontline operations platform, the Director of Product, Core products is the leader accountable for making that evolution real across everything we ship today.

This role collaborates on the product strategy, team performance, and business outcomes for Zipline’s core platform: the tools used daily by 620,000+ frontline workers across 200+ world-class brands. You will lead a formed team of product managers, own the 12–18 month roadmap, and serve as the connective tissue between day-to-day execution and Zipline’s five active strategic pillars.

This is a senior people leadership role for someone who has been here before. You will inherit a talented, formed team and be expected to run it: elevating craft, moving decision-making down, and creating the conditions for PMs to operate with autonomy and accountability, driving a roadmap that is creating revenue for the business, while bringing the team forward with AI-enabled workflows.

You report to the SVP, Product and act as a peer to the Director of Product, Strategic Ventures. Together you represent the full span of Zipline’s product ambition: you execute on what exists and evolves today; your peer bets on what comes next. You are the strategic execution layer the SVP needs in order to operate at a company-level altitude.

What You’ll Do

• Own the core product roadmap
• Define and maintain the 12–18 month product roadmap across Zipline’s core platform pillars.
• Translate Zipline’s vision and strategy into clear, sequenced, evidence-backed product investments.
• Ensure every PM on your team owns a strategy (not just a backlog) and can speak to outcomes, not features.
• Build rigorous roadmap narratives that give executives and stakeholders clarity on where we are going and why.
• Represent Zipline’s core product story compellingly on stage at Summer Camp and other customer-focused functions.
• Lead and develop a high-performing PM team
• Manage, coach, and develop a team of product managers across Zipline’s core product pillars.
• Apply strong situational leadership, meeting each PM where they are.
• Drive the IC-to-leader transition on your team.
• Hold a high bar on product craft: quality of discovery, rigor of prioritization, clarity of outcome definition.
• Drive strategy-to-execution alignment across Engineering, Product, and Design (EPD)
• Own the translation of company strategy into product decisions, PM priorities, and quarterly plans.
• Serve as the escalation path for your PMs: unblock decisions, resolve cross-functional friction, and keep teams moving.
• Partner with Engineering and Design leadership to run a healthy, high-functioning EPD triad for the core business.
• Champion AI-first product thinking across the core platform
• Integrate AI strategy into the core product roadmap.
• Work with your PMs to evolve Zipline’s AI capabilities across core operational, engagement, and intelligence use cases.
• Represent the voice of the customer
• Build and maintain deep knowledge of Zipline’s customers, their frontline realities, and the problems that matter most to them.

What This Role Explicitly Does Not Own

• New vertical exploration, horizontal product extensions, or net-new growth bets (owned by Director of Product, Strategic Ventures)
• Long-term design strategy, design systems ownership, or design team management
• Engineering team management or technical architecture decisions
• Product-led growth mechanics or self-serve acquisition
• Corporate development, M&A assessment, or partnership support

What Success Looks Like

• The Director, Product can operate at a company-level altitude.
• Zipline’s core product team operates with clarity, ownership, and velocity.
• PMs on your team are growing in craft, strategic thinking, and the ability to lead without being told what to do.
• The roadmap is coherent, sequenced, and evidence-backed.
• Design and delivery of the Product Roadmap creates meaningful and direct revenue-impacting success to the business.
• AI is woven into the core product roadmap as a genuine, differentiated capability.
• Customers feel the product getting better: faster, smarter, and more relevant to how their frontline actually operates.
• You can stand on stage and tell Zipline’s core product story as compellingly as anyone in the company.
• Core product teams receive validated opportunities from Strategic Ventures and can scale them confidently.

Compensation

At Zipline, we're committed to paying our team fairly, transparently, and in a way that supports growth. This role is targeting an annual salary within Canada of $197,208 CAD to $241,008 CAD.

The broad salary ranges reflect the growth someone will experience in the role—from developing skills to reaching expertise within their career level.

What's In It For You

• Remote-first culture: Join a high performing, fully remote team and work where you're comfortable.
• Stock Options: Get meaningful ownership in a fast-growing, venture-backed company shaping the future of retail.
• Time off: Flexible time-off policy and a monthly coffee-shop stipend.
• Benefits: World-class medical, dental, and vision policies.
• Team Connection: Annual company off-sites in fun locations.
• Volunteering: Paid day off to volunteer for a nonprofit of their choice every quarter.
• Learning: Unlimited access to our Udemy Business account.
• Great humans, great work: Work with kind, collaborative teammates who care about doing meaningful work.