Vice President Product, Emerging Markets

Verra Mobility•Chicago, IL

About The Position

Who we are... 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 for Emerging Markets is a transformative executive responsible for identifying, validating, and accelerating new product opportunities across high-growth, early-stage markets. This leader will build and scale a modern, experimentation-driven product organization focused on discovering unmet customer needs, rapidly testing hypotheses, and developing product concepts that can evolve into meaningful new revenue streams. This role serves as Verra Mobility’s venture builder for opportunities that fall outside existing business units but have the potential to become significant new revenue streams—whether through new products, new customer segments, new channels, or adjacent mobility markets. The mandate is not to build long roadmaps, but to generate validated learning and commercial traction through rapid discovery‑delivery loops—failing fast, pivoting decisively, or doubling down with conviction. As the executive owner of product strategy for emerging markets, this leader connects deep market understanding with bold product innovation—transforming ambiguous, cross‑functional problems into clear, testable concepts with the potential to scale. Success is measured by the quality of decisions, the pace of learning, and real‑world traction: customer value, willingness‑to‑pay signals, scalable go‑to‑market pathways, and operational/regulatory feasibility. What matters isn’t the number of experiments—it’s the speed and rigor with which ideas are validated, de‑risked, and converted into viable businesses. Product Operating Model: This role institutionalizes a modern Product Operating Model for incubation—empowered, cross‑functional product teams that own outcomes, iterate continuously, and operate with explicit decision rights and evidence‑driven governance. Graduation Expectation: Concepts that demonstrate repeatable traction are thoughtfully transitioned into a business unit (or become the seed of a new one) with clear accountability and a defined scaling plan - ensuring validated concepts transition to clear ownership.

Requirements

10+ years in Product Management, Innovation, Strategy, or related functions, with 5+ years building and leading product teams.
Bachelor’s degree in Business, Computer Science or a related field of study.
Proven experience developing 0→1 products, validating new markets, and driving early-stage product development cycles.
Strong command of experimentation frameworks, research methodologies, and metrics for early-stage product validation.
Demonstrated ability to bring concepts from exploration to market traction and measurable commercial outcomes.
Highly collaborative partner to Engineering, Design, Marketing, Sales, and Executive leadership teams.
Product Operating Model fluency: Hands‑on experience working in (or leading change toward) a modern product model built on continuous discovery, continuous delivery, empowered teams, and accountability to real outcomes.
Strength in complex, regulated environments: Comfortable navigating operationally intensive or regulated spaces where technical, operational, and compliance feasibility must be proven early in the lifecycle.
Disciplined venture portfolio mindset: A track record of advancing what works and stopping what doesn’t.

Nice To Haves

Background in B2B SaaS, platforms, IoT, mobility, telematics, or adjacent innovation-focused domains in highly regulated markets preferred.

Responsibilities

Product Leadership & Organizational Build Build and lead a high-performing emerging markets product organization, including Product Management, Product Discovery, Research, and Experimentation Operations.
Foster a culture of speed, curiosity, and experimentation - where assumptions are challenged, and decisions are driven by evidence.
Emerging Market & Product Strategy Translate company strategy into a clear emerging markets vision, including opportunity areas, hypotheses to test, and a multi-year incubation portfolio.
Develop and maintain a continuously re‑prioritized opportunity backlog—framed as customer problems to solve (and for whom)—with explicit hypotheses, constraints, and clear “kill criteria.”
Build a dynamic opportunity roadmap informed by customer needs, market trends, competitive insights, and technology shifts.
Define success criteria for early-stage concepts to progress from exploration → validation → incubation → Define a clear portfolio thesis - identifying where Verra Mobility has meaningful, differentiated advantage (data, distribution, regulatory expertise, fleet and municipal relationships, transaction scale) and outlining which types of opportunities are out of scope.
Lead portfolio investment decisions with executive partners by setting small‑bet budgets, establishing evidence‑based stage gates, and making explicit tradeoffs across the incubation portfolio.
Discovery, Research & Validation Establish a rigorous discovery practice combining qualitative research, market analysis, rapid prototyping, and quantitative validation.
Ensure that product decisions are backed by customer insight, data, and well-designed experiments - not intuition alone.
Build a reusable “insight-to-opportunity” engine that continuously identifies and de-risks opportunities across new markets, segments, and geographies.
Institutionalize continuous discovery: Ensure every venture team has direct customer engagement, leverages prototypes to test value and usability, and validates viability - including pricing and willingness‑to‑pay - early in the process, not post‑
Standardize decision artifacts as enablers, not bureaucracy: Introduce concise Opportunity Briefs and Decision Briefs that clearly articulate hypotheses, supporting evidence, risks (including regulatory), and the next tests required.
Experimentation & Testing at Scale Operationalize a structured approach to experimentation with clear frameworks for hypothesis creation, test selection, success metrics, and learnings.
Champion lean product methodologies: rapid prototyping, MVP/MVT strategies, pilot programs, and incremental validation.
Ensure findings are actionable, measured, and reused across the product teams.
Establish learning‑velocity metrics that matter: how quickly teams reach real customers, run their first tests, generate early revenue signals, and advance through the explore → validate → incubate → scale pipeline—while avoiding metrics that reward experiment volume over insight.
Drive disciplined risk testing: ensuring teams validate the critical risks up front—value, usability, feasibility, and commercial viability.
New Product Incubation & Cross-Functional Delivery Partner with Engineering, Design, and Data to bring early-stage concepts to life through prototypes, beta releases, and pilot implementations.
Balance speed with quality—help teams ship quickly while protecting the integrity of the customer experience.
Set up evidence‑based investment governance: use clear stage gates, decision rights, funding steps, and data‑driven “continue / pivot / stop” reviews, supported by simple portfolio oversight.
Create a repeatable path to scale: transition validated opportunities into business units with defined ownership, staffing, roadmap integration, tech and support readiness, and commercial enablement.
Go-to-Market Alignment & Commercial Readiness Partner with Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success to test messaging, identify segments, develop field-tested value propositions, and validate pricing models.
Ensure GTM teams have clear, evidence-backed narratives, early product training, and pilot playbooks.
Test distribution paths from day one: pressure‑test channel strategy, acquisition costs, sales cycles, procurement barriers, and partner readiness early, ensuring scalability before meaningful investment.
Launch lighthouse pilots designed with crisp success criteria and a repeatable playbook rather than bespoke, one‑off solutions.
Talent, Culture & Evangelism Build an organization where teams feel psychologically safe to explore, experiment, and fail forward.
Increase product and experimentation literacy across the broader business through training, workshops, and storytelling.
Act as a visible thought leader for innovation, emerging markets, and new product development.
Create organizational visibility into learning: publish a clear portfolio learning record that documents assumptions, tests, insights, and decisions—enabling the organization to build on shared knowledge instead of reinventing or repeating past missteps.