Instacart recently acquired Caper AI to help retailers unify the in-store and online shopping experience for customers no matter how they choose to shop. Caper’s cutting-edge, AI-powered shopping carts and automated checkout counters bring together online and offline shopping to create a completely new in-store experience for customers.

In addition to acquiring Caper AI’s technology, we’re delighted to welcome the Caper team to the Instacart family. The global Caper team is based primarily in New York City and Shanghai, China, and will bring new hardware expertise to Instacart’s already deep product and technology team. Together, we’re excited to create new ways for retailers to solve for the ever-changing needs of their businesses and customers.

ABOUT CAPER

Caper builds smart shopping carts powered by deep learning and computer vision to enable a seamless grab-and-go retail experience. We differ from other emerging cashierless technologies because we are the scalable solution. Caper’s autonomous checkout technology is plug and play, meaning it requires no in-store renovation, no operational overhaul, no heavy computations or endless image labeling. Any retailer can buy the carts and their entire store is upgraded with cashierless capabilities. Caper costs less than 1% of other cashierless competitor’s infrastructure. We are already live in-stores and our customers love us! 

As a part of the Caper team, you’ll be a part of a culture that cares about its people and the future we’re shaping together. At Caper, we may all come from different backgrounds, but we all share one common vision - to fundamentally disrupt the retail industry.

OVERVIEW

We empower our product teams to solve hard problems – customer problems and business problems – in ways that our customers love, yet work for our business.  Our product teams are cross-functional and durable, generally composed of a product manager, a product designer, and several engineers.

We staff our product teams with the skills necessary to come up with effective solutions that are valuable (our customers choose to buy or use), viable (the solution works within the many constraints of the business), usable (the user can figure out how to use) and feasible (our engineers have the skills and technology to implement). The design team spans the disciplines of product design, industrial design, marketing design, and brand design.

We consider each touchpoint with our shoppers & partners – whether it’s the onboarding flow of our carts, a promotional sign, or an email – to be part of the same customer journey. As such, our design organization owns that complete customer experience. We’re passionate about building ONE design organization to provide ONE comprehensive customer experience. And we need your help to do this!

THE ROLE

The Director, Product will lead a team focused on the core tenets of Caper’s strategic product offering.  In this role you will refine the vision of Caper’s products and focus on delivering a sophisticated product that combines computer vision, hardware and software.  As a strategic people and product leader you will develop your team to derive and review insights gathered from shoppers, partners, session data, industry trends and more.  By driving long-term strategy at a group level and collaborating across the organization, you will shape our product objectives & KPIs while ensuring they are well understood and actioned upon!

ABOUT THE TEAM

Caper builds smart shopping carts powered by deep learning and computer vision to enable a seamless grab-and-go retail experience. Caper’s unique technology is a plug- and-play solution that does not require retail store renovation, operational overhaul, heavy compute, and endless image labeling & training. Retailers simply purchase smart shopping carts and the entire store is upgraded with cashierless capabilities!

Caper is one of the fastest-growing retail automation technology products in the market, costs less than 1% of our competitions’ infrastructure and is already widely adopted in the marketplace.  Our cross-functional and durable Product team solves hard customer & business problems in ways that our customers love.  

ABOUT THE JOB

- Lead, build, motivate and empower the Product Management team.  Promote best practices & manage product planning, customer & product discovery, the product development process, and more.  Collaborate with teams across the organization and refine cross-functional processes 

- Move the needle using qualitative and quantitative insights to clarify decisions.  Identify new opportunities and drive new product ideas into implementable projects

- Champion great design and user experience practices.  Create scalable easy to use products that connect with their users.  Employ testing and feedback as crucial components to create useful and functional products

- Promote alignment across partner-facing teams by regularly sharing product updates and collaborating around unmet partner needs

- Publish company-wide updates of product performance metrics, team performance and product roadmaps.  Influence teams, stakeholders and executives through your use of data and logic

- As required, dive into independent contributor capacity to get hands-on and drive product initiatives

ABOUT YOU

MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS

- 7+ years of Product Management & Leadership experience

- Strong experiences building, leading, coaching Product teams and running Scrum process

- Strong experience managing end-to-end product deliver and roadmap strategy & definition

- Knowledge of industry standard design tools and strong design thinking practices

- Proven experience leveraging data to make good decisions when confronted with ambiguity.  You should be data and metrics driven 

- Experience partnering closely with Engineering on strategy and technology decisions

- Engineering background or strong understanding of technical implementation at a high level

- Ability to gauge challenging technical implementations

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

- Experience developing hardware and/or human computer interaction products 

- Strong presentation skills and experiences managing multiple stakeholders

- Experience developing consumer-facing products, in retail, restaurant, hospitality or e-commerce

- Experience with computer vision, software & hardware, IoT products