Vice President Product, Design

Verra Mobility•Chicago, IL

About The Position

Verra Mobility is a global leader in smart mobility. We develop technology-enabled solutions that help the world move safely and easily. We are fostering the development of safe cities, working with police departments and municipalities to install over 4,000 red-light, speed, and school bus stop arm safety cameras across North America. We are also creating smart roadways, serving the world's largest commercial fleets and rental car companies to manage tolling transactions and violations for over 8.5 million vehicles. And we are a leading provider of connected systems, processing nearly 165 million transactions each year across 50+ individual tolling authorities. Position Overview: The Vice President of Product Design is a transformational executive who will build, lead, and scale a world-class, multi-disciplinary design organization - spanning Product Design, Research, Content Design, and Design Operations. As the executive owner of experience strategy across our connected-mobility portfolio, this leader translates complex, cross-functional problems into simple, trustworthy, human-centered experiences that drive measurable outcomes in adoption, satisfaction, and time-to-value. Operating as both strategist and organizational builder, the VP connects discovery to delivery at scale: establishing an insights-to-experience pipeline, institutionalizing a modern design system, and creating the operating model where empowered product teams can ship coherent, accessible, and high-quality experiences - reliably. This role is a key driver of Verra Mobility’s evolution toward a modern Product Operating Model—empowering durable, cross‑functional product teams to continuously discover, experiment, and deliver solutions that solve real customer problems, rather than simply executing projects or managing handoffs. As a senior member of the executive “product trio,” the VP partners closely with Product Management and Engineering leadership to elevate decision quality, accelerate learning, and ensure that experience strategy is fully integrated into product strategy. This leader plays a critical role in shaping how teams work, how decisions are made, and how customer value is delivered end‑to‑end. Success in this role is measured not by artifacts, but by impact: customer trust and usability, business outcomes, velocity and quality of delivery, and the lasting capabilities of the design organization. Success is also defined by enabling teams to confidently and independently make data‑backed product decisions, reducing reliance on top‑down approvals.

Requirements

Customer Focus: Keeps the customer’s voice central via research, testing, and telemetry - driving measurable improvements in adoption, efficiency, and satisfaction.
Strategic Mindset: Shapes a north-star experience vision aligned to business strategy and evolving user/technology trends in the connected-mobility ecosystem.
Product Operating Model Transformation: Demonstrated success institutionalizing a modern Product Operating Model with empowered cross-functional teams, clear decision rights, discovery-first practices, accountability and transparency.
Executive Decision Quality: Makes timely, evidence-based calls using data, research, and prototypes; ensures ownership and alignment across functions.
Accountability: Sets high standards for craft and delivery; defines outcomes and builds a culture of ownership, clarity, and reliable follow-through.
Talent & Team Leadership: Scales and mentors a diverse org; strengthens cross-functional partnership; fosters a high-performance, growth-oriented environment.
Innovation: Drives experimentation and prototyping; converts learning—successful or not—into repeatable patterns and systems.
Executive Communication & Influence: Tells a compelling story with clarity and empathy; aligns executives and teams around journeys, rationale, and trade-offs.
Coaching & Empowerment: Demonstrated ability to coach leaders and teams toward empowered, evidence‑based decision‑making—reducing reliance on centralized approvals while improving both quality and speed.
Systems Thinking: Skilled at designing the overall “system of work”—including team interfaces, governance mechanisms, metrics, and incentives—so that healthy product behaviors become the natural default.
10+ years in Product/UX Design with 5+ years leading and scaling design teams; prior experience owning a multi-disciplinary design organization strongly preferred.
Bachelor’s degree in Design, Business or a related field of study; advanced degree preferred.
Track record building design practices in B2B SaaS and/or IoT/platform environments in highly regulated environments; mobility, telematics, or operations-intensive domains a plus.
Demonstrated success in design systems ownership, UX research leadership, and evidence-based decision-making.
Portfolio of shipped platform products showing simplification of complex domains and measurable impact on trust, usability, and adoption.
Strong partner to Product & Engineering; fluency with experimentation, analytics, and business metrics.
Demonstrated success working in empowered product team environments (continuous discovery + continuous delivery), with comfort operating through outcomes, constraints, and decision principles rather than detailed plans.
Experience defining and using experience metrics (e.g., task success, time-to-value, error rates, trust signals) to guide strategy and investment decisions.

Responsibilities

Build and scale a high-performing design organization (Product Design, UXR, Content Design, DesignOps) with a clear org model, leveling rubric, career paths, and succession planning.
Create a strategic hiring plan (in-house + partner ecosystem), manage budget, and establish vendor strategy for surge and specialized needs.
Foster a culture of craft excellence, curiosity, and accountability—with consistent critique, coaching, and peer development.
Establish a clear engagement model that embeds design and research directly within durable product teams—rather than operating as a shared service—supported by defined decision rights and expectations.
Coach design leaders and teams to operate with high autonomy and accountability, embracing “strong opinions, loosely held” and prioritizing evidence over escalation.
Translate company strategy and the 2026 priorities into a cohesive experience vision, north-star journeys, and an outcome-oriented experience strategy and set of prioritized customer opportunities portfolio roadmap that aligns across Product, Engineering, and Go-to-Market.
Define how we measure design’s impact on customer and business outcomes (adoption, retention, revenue influence, operational efficiency).
Define experience principles and guardrails that enable teams to move quickly while maintaining a cohesive customer experience - ensuring clarity, consistency, accessibility, trust, and safety.
Partner with Product and Engineering to translate strategy into outcomes and problems to solve, not feature lists, empowering teams to determine the right solutions.
Establish a rigorous UXR practice (qualitative, quantitative, and telemetry) and a research repository that continuously feeds discovery and de-risks decisions.
Champion continuous discovery in empowered product teams (field observation, rapid testing, experiment design) and ensure insights are valid, actionable, and durable.
Establish and champion a continuous‑discovery cadence where weekly routines include customer conversations, fast prototyping, and data‑driven experiments, replacing long, infrequent research cycles.
Enable teams to instrument experiences with meaningful leading indicators—task success, time‑to‑value, error rates, trust/confidence signals—so decisions are measured by impact, not activity.
Treat the design system as a product—with a roadmap, governance, and documented tokens/patterns that accelerate delivery of coherent, accessible experiences.
Define standards for accessibility, internationalization, security, and regulatory compliance across web, mobile, and device interfaces (SaaS/IoT).
Shift governance from top‑down approval to scalable enablement, offering reusable patterns, templates, and self‑serve tools that preserve quality without slowing teams down.
Implement lightweight, team‑owned delivery practices that support continuous delivery - clear intent, rapid iteration, measurable outcomes, and defined quality bars - while maintaining predictable design workflows (briefs, milestones, QA, handoff) that balance craft with delivery velocity.
Run portfolio-level design reviews to ensure cross-product coherence, reduce design/tech debt, and make trade-offs transparent and deliberate.
Ensure discovery and delivery are tightly connected - teams should validate assumptions before building and refine solutions through iterative releases, reducing big‑batch handoffs and phase‑gate cycles.
Embed the Product Trio model (Product, Design, Engineering) at the team level, fostering shared ownership of outcomes, clear decision rights, and empowered judgment.
Improve organizational decision quality by standardizing discovery practices—opportunity framing, prototype testing, assumption mapping, and experiment design—and coaching leaders to ask better questions rather than request additional artifacts.
Partner with Product and Engineering leadership to shift away from project‑model behaviors (heavy upfront requirements, downstream design, output‑based commitments) toward true outcome‑based accountability.
Operate as an equal partner to Product and Engineering in vision, roadmapping, and prioritization; shape scope to protect experience quality while hitting timelines.
Collaborate with Marketing, CX, and Sales to ensure end-to-end journey consistency and equip field teams with clear narratives and artifacts (demos, playbooks).
Reinforce an outcomes‑focused culture by valuing learning, customer impact, and smart decision‑making—not excessive artifacts or cosmetic perfection.