Director of Product Development

Director, Product Development

The Director, Product Development leads digital product organization, owning the vision, strategy, and end-to-end delivery of the customer-facing and internal software products that power the customer experience. This role sets the product roadmap across web, mobile, and booking platforms, leads a team of product managers, and partners closely with Engineering, Design, Marketing, and Operations to translate business goals into shipped product outcomes that drive growth, retention, and operational efficiency across a global tunnel network.

Duties and Responsibilities

• Lead the build-out, evolution, and ongoing optimization of Goodwin Recruiting's consumer website — owning information architecture, content strategy, page performance, conversion optimization, SEO and AEO (Answer Engine Optimization), and integration with the booking and member experience.
• Lead 0-to-1 builds of POS, ecommerce, and bespoke applications — from architecture through GA.
• Operationalize an AI-native SDLC: coding assistants, code-gen, automated tests, AI code review, agentic workflows, and the guardrails to make it safe.
• Own reliability and performance of in-market POS and ecommerce apps — multi-AZ, zero-downtime deploys, SLOs, observability, and on-call leadership.
• Architect for in-memory and edge compute: Redis / KeyDB / Memcached, edge KV, caching patterns that keep p95 low under load.
• Partner with VP, Head of Technology with product vision, strategy, and multi-year roadmap for digital product portfolio — including the consumer website, mobile applications, booking and reservations platform, member and loyalty programs, and internal operations tools.
• Partner with Marketing, Brand, and Design to deliver a unified, on-brand digital experience across web and mobile that drives flyer acquisition, conversion, and retention.
• Champion customer-centric discovery — leveraging research, analytics, experimentation, and direct flyer and instructor feedback to validate problems and solutions before investing in build.
• Own website and product KPIs and OKRs — site traffic, organic and AI-referred visits, bookings conversion, repeat visit rates, member growth, NPS, and operational efficiency — and report results regularly to executive leadership.
• Establish and evolve product management practices: discovery, prioritization frameworks, roadmap planning, lifecycle management, launch readiness, and post-launch measurement.
• Manage vendor and partner relationships for web development, CMS, SEO/GEO/AEO tooling, product tooling, third-party integrations, and platform partners.

Work Experience and Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Business, Computer Science, Engineering, Design, or a related field; MBA or advanced degree preferred.
• 10+ years in software engineering, with 4+ years leading engineering teams. Shipped at least one consumer-facing web/ecommerce and POS product from zero to scaled production
• At least one bespoke/custom application (kiosk, in-venue, mobile, embedded, or internal tool) — comfortable choosing the right stack per form factor.
• Demonstrated experience leading the build-out, redesign, or major evolution of a consumer-facing website — including IA, content management, performance, SEO, AEO, and conversion optimization.
• Working understanding of SEO, GEO, AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) best practices — structured data, schema markup, content design for LLM-powered search, and measuring visibility across both traditional search engines and AI answer engines (e.g., ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews).
• Experience setting product strategy and roadmaps for a multi-product portfolio across web and mobile platforms.
• Working knowledge of modern web stacks, CMS platforms (e.g., headless CMS, WordPress, Contentful), and the marketing and analytics tooling that supports a high-performing website.
• Strong analytical foundation — fluent with product and web analytics tools (e.g., Amplitude, Mixpanel, Google Analytics, Google Search Console), experimentation, and translating data into prioritization decisions.
• Proven web performance wins tied to a business metric (conversion, checkout, session value).
• Deep customer discovery skills — comfortable running interviews, usability sessions, and concept tests to de-risk product investments.
• Experience working in agile delivery environments and partnering with engineering on scoping, technical tradeoffs, and release planning.
• Track record of recruiting, developing, and retaining strong product managers.
• Excellent executive communication — able to translate strategy and tradeoffs for both technical and business audiences.
• Strong business acumen with experience tying product outcomes to revenue, retention, and operational KPIs.
• Operating experience for high-traffic, near-zero-downtime POS or omnichannel commerce systems (payments, inventory, offline-tolerance, PCI-aware).
• Experience in consumer, experiential, hospitality, retail, or membership businesses.