VP of Product

The title says VP. The seat says co-architect: no bureaucracy to manage, full ownership of product strategy and surface direction side-by-side with the founder.

Product.ai is building the verified truth layer for shopping, the intelligence that tells you what's actually true about a product, including when not to buy. Our first proof at scale is SimplyCodes, the code verification service, at ~$22M a year in revenue, profitable, bootstrapped since 2009. No outside investors. No board. Fewer than twenty operators outbuilding companies 10x our size.

Why This Role Exists

We are advertising one seat through several doors. One door reads Head of Product. This one reads VP of Product, because some of the people who should take this seat have spent a decade earning that title and will not apply to a role that looks like a step down. The seat itself is built for a true product co-architect: you co-own product strategy and surface direction side-by-side with the founder, and you own the consumer quality bar, user experience, and agentic commerce execution end to end.

A VP title at a traditional company pulls in people who expect a large management hierarchy. Here there is no management theater on day one. Instead of managing a layer of PMs, you partner directly with the founder to shape what we build and why, using coding agents as force multipliers to turn strategy into locked specs and shipped product at 10x speed.

Our product thesis is settled and clear: on the consumer side, our Verification Checker lets any shopper paste what an AI, an article, a brand page, or a friend told them to buy, and we grade the claims inside it across five verification states - free to consumers to win trust and habit. On the commercial side, AI systems and shopping agents pay per call for keyed access to our verified commerce truth. Your first hires, as we scale, are earned by the surfaces we ship. The pull here is scope: co-owning the product strategy and the surfaces that define verified commerce, with the economics of an owner rather than a middle manager.

The System You'll Need to Model

• The Verification Checker and knowledge-graph products. Shoppers paste any recommendation - from an AI assistant, a review article, a brand page, or a friend - and the Verification Checker grades every claim inside it across five verification states with citations intact, combining our Commerce Graph, Truth Graph, and Preference Graph. Every product call is about how those layers combine to deliver an unmistakable verdict.
• Trust-calibrated consumer and conversational surfaces. A general assistant averages the internet with confidence. Ours is built to grade claims rigorously and say a calibrated "don't buy this" when the evidence fails. The product bar is whether a user trusts that verdict on a purchase that matters to them. Calibrated trust is harder than engagement, and engagement metrics will not tell you if you got it right.
• Agent-first commerce and monetization. The consumer Verification Checker stays free to build habit and trust, while AI systems and shopping agents pay per call for keyed access to our verified commerce truth. Being chosen and called by an AI agent is becoming what being indexed by a search engine used to be, and you co-own that product playbook while you ship against it. The commercial relationship with those developer and agent platforms belongs to our commercial seat; the product shape and capabilities they call belong to you.
• Spec-driven agentic development. Coding agents act as force multipliers across the build loop: a product decision becomes a visual prototype and a locked spec, coding agents build against it, and separate verifier agents grade the finished build against that spec. You own the product strategy, the user experience bar, the spec, and the verdict on what ships.
• A governed knowledge substrate. The company runs its own operating decisions through Cortex, a shared AI brain that answers its own questions from thousands of internal documents - the same product family this seat sells externally. You will work inside the exact system you are building for customers, so every gap you feel is a gap a customer feels too.
• A self-amending rules engine. Since August 2026 any operator here can propose a change to how the company runs and ship it live, no founder approval required. You will model and shape a governance system that evolves in real time alongside the product.

If reading that energizes you, keep going. If it feels overwhelming or underspecified, this isn't the right fit.

What You Will Own

• Product strategy and surface direction, side-by-side with the founder. Co-owning the roadmap and product law across the free consumer Verification Checker, conversational answers, SEO-first Truth Graph pages, personalization, and agent-callable commerce surfaces. Coding agents accelerate the build; you own the strategy, product spec, acceptance bar, and verdict on what ships.
• The consumer quality bar. The standard for everything a shopper touches, written as falsifiable evidence tests for four to six outcomes. When the bar and the schedule conflict, you hold the bar.
• The decision-shaped interface standard. Partnering with our Founding Designer on what a verdict looks like on screen: an interface built around the decision a shopper is making (buy, wait, walk away) and the five verification states of our Checker, rather than raw content.
• One or two falsifiable outcomes a quarter, run end-to-end. From strategic thesis to locked spec to verified build, measured on consumer and agent outcomes moved rather than headcount grown.
• Your seat charter. Within your first quarter you co-sign a charter for this seat: one machine-checkable number that proves the seat is working, and a clear partnership model with the founder.

You will combine your product strategy, consumer taste, and leadership craft with directing coding agents as force multipliers, verification design at machine speed, and distribution built for AI shopping agents and consumers alike.

Who You Are

How you think. You form your own working model of a complex system, co-architect product strategy from first principles, and update fast when a hypothesis turns out wrong. You bring product thesis, taste, and the clarity of thought to write down what you conclude.

How you work. You treat coding agents as force multipliers you direct and verify, not staff you trust blindly. Because you can do the product and spec work by hand, you catch mistakes before they ship, moving fluidly between high-level product strategy with the founder and an implementable spec in a single day.

What you've probably built. You have owned a product line or major consumer or platform surface end to end and can point to the strategy calls you made and the outcomes they produced - as a VP/Head of Product, a GM who ran product and go-to-market together, or a founder who shipped their own product. We weigh the artifact and reasoning far more than the title on your last job.

Who this isn't for. Wrong if the appeal of "VP" is a 40-person org chart to manage from a distance; here you co-own strategy and build directly with AI leverage. Wrong if you wait for instructions rather than forming your own thesis, want one narrow lane, or treat the seat as an 18-month resume stop. You'll be happiest here if you want the strategic voice, product scope, and economics of an owner.

How We Hire

We don't run traditional executive interviews.

Async video screen (or Fast-Track Portfolio/GitHub review). About 15 minutes, on your own time - or share a standout portfolio of live shipped products, public specs, or GitHub work on your application to fast-track straight to stakeholder and founder conversations.

Calls with company stakeholders. Short conversations with the people you'd build beside.

Conversation with the founder. How you think about product strategy, the Verification Checker, and agent-first commerce, where you push back, and how we co-design surfaces live.

Paid work trial (PRJ-77). A paid strategic product trial taking a live Product.ai consumer or agent-commerce problem from product thesis to locked spec and verified prototype.

If the work above reads like yours but your resume is unconventional, apply anyway. We hire on the work and the reasoning, not the pedigree.

Compensation & Ownership

Total first-year comp: $325,000 - $475,000 (base + performance-based PIU ownership and profit-share program).

Base: $250,000 - $300,000.

Product.ai is a profitable, founder-owned company generating ~$22M/yr in revenue with zero venture debt. Beyond base salary, senior operators participate in our Profit Interest Unit (PIU) ownership and profit-share program ($0 strike price units sharing directly in annual free-cash-flow distributions and annual company tender liquidity, earned on performance milestones after joining, never day-one vesting). 100% family premium coverage and an uncapped token budget steered by return.

Based in Santa Monica, Los Angeles, on our high-trust hybrid rhythm: four focused in-office half-days (Mon/Tue/Thu/Fri 9am-2pm), with Wednesdays and afternoons open to work from wherever you do your best work. Relocation support available.