Executive Director, Product

POLITICO is seeking an experienced Executive Director, Product to lead the strategy, design, and delivery of POLITICO’s subscription products for policy and public affairs professionals. The role spans commercial strategy, editorial innovation, and technology execution — driving measurable growth in subscriber acquisition, engagement, and retention across POLITICO Pro and emerging product lines. The ideal candidate combines strong UX research capability with a proven ability to translate subscriber insights into product roadmaps that deliver commercial results, partnering closely with editorial, technology, data, and commercial teams. 

Who You Are: 

• A senior product leader with deep experience building and scaling subscription-based digital products, balancing editorial mission, commercial goals, and long-term platform strategy. 

• Highly user-centric, with a strong track record of translating research, data, and market insight into clear product vision, roadmaps, and measurable business impact. 

What You’ll Do: 

Product Strategy & Roadmap 

• Help develop the product vision and roadmap for POLITICO’s subscription products, aligning with commercial revenue targets and editorial priorities. 

• Prioritize features, enhancements, and new product concepts based on rigorous user research, competitive analysis, and business impact modeling. 

• Develop and maintain a clear product strategy that supports dual-track growth: news-led subscriptions and data/intelligence-as-a-product offerings. 

• Identify opportunities for AI-driven distribution, personalization, and workflow integration to strengthen the subscriber value proposition. 

User Experience Research & Insight 

• Work alongside our Data and Insights team to undertake continuous UX research encompassing qualitative interviews, usability testing, surveys, journey mapping, and behavioural analytics. 

• Translate research findings into actionable personas, jobs-to-be-done frameworks, and evidence-based product recommendations. 

• Champion a culture of user-centricity across the organization, ensuring that research insights inform decisions in editorial packaging, commercial positioning, and platform design. 

Cross-Functional Collaboration 

• Partner with the Commercial team to ensure product capabilities support subscriber acquisition, upsell, and renewal strategies across POLITICO’s customer base. 

• Work hand-in-hand with Technology and Engineering to scope, spec, and deliver product features. 

• Collaborate with Editorial leadership to align product design with content strategy, ensuring the subscriber experience surfaces the most relevant federal and state policy intelligence. 

• Coordinate with Data and Analytics teams to build measurement frameworks, define KPIs, and run experimentation programs (A/B tests, feature flags, cohort analysis). 

Stakeholder Management 

• Communicate product strategy, progress, and trade-offs clearly to senior leadership, including the C-suite and cross-functional steering committees. 

• Manage stakeholder expectations across editorial, commercial, and technology partners with transparency and rigor. 

What You’ll Need: 

Required 

• 8+ years of product management experience, with at least 3 years in a senior or director-level role. 

• Demonstrable expertise in user experience research: you have personally designed, conducted, and operationalized research programs that directly shaped product decisions. 

• Proven track record of leading subscription product development in a B2B environment. 

• Experience working at the intersection of editorial/content, commercial, and technology teams — ideally within media, publishing, or information services. 

• Strong command of product analytics tools and methodologies, including cohort analysis, funnel optimization, and experimentation design. 

• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills with the ability to present complex trade-offs to diverse audiences. 

• Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field; advanced degree (MBA, HCI, or equivalent) a plus. 

Preferred 

• Experience with U.S. policy, government affairs, or political intelligence products. 

• Deep understanding of the U.S. federal and state policy landscape, including how government relations professionals, lobbyists, and regulatory affairs teams consume intelligence. 

• Familiarity with AI/ML-driven personalization, recommendation systems, or structured data products. 

• Experience building or managing API/MCP-based data distribution products or developer-facing tools. 

• Knowledge of the U.S. energy, environment, or sustainability policy landscape. 

We value our people. Click here for more on what we offer and what it’s like to work for POLITICO. 

Let’s keep in touch. You can view our list of open positions here. We hope to see your application soon! 

About Us. 

POLITICO illuminates the forces shaping global power. Since 2007, we have delivered intelligence that anticipates tomorrow's headlines, not reports on yesterday's news. As politics has increasingly become the defining force of our era, our work has never been more vital. 

Cabinet secretaries and Ministers start their mornings with our analysis. CEOs shape strategy around our reporting. Advocacy leaders rely on our insights to move policy. We deliver the straightforward facts and clear-eyed analysis they need to navigate the most complex political landscape of our lifetimes. 

Our 1,100+ publishing professionals across the world's key democratic capitals—Washington, Brussels, London, Paris, Berlin, Sacramento, and New York—form the world's premier politics and policy newsroom. We tell the story of how power really works by explaining who wields it and how they plan to exercise it, connecting dots others miss and delivering scoops from sources others don't even know exist. 

Innovation has always been a core tenet of our story. At launch, we bet that depth would trump scale, that talent would trump traffic, and that politics would become central to modern life. In 2011, we made another bet and launched POLITICO Pro to help decision-makers understand the business of government, transforming both how they shape government action and the business of journalism itself. 

These bets have made POLITICO the most successful digital news startup of its generation and the indispensable resource for leaders who shape the future. Today, we are a rarity in media: a growing, profitable, and sustainable news organization. 

POLITICO is a subsidiary of Axel Springer SE, a family-owned transatlantic media company headquartered in Berlin and New York. Axel Springer is dedicated to shaping the future of journalism in the free world, believing that a free and informed society is essential to democracy. The company’s guiding principles - first articulated as The Essentials by founder Axel Springer in the aftermath of World War II - remain a cornerstone of the company’s foundation today. Learn more about Axel Springer.