VP Product Management

Company: IPS Group is a design, engineering and manufacturing company focused on low power wireless telecommunications and parking technologies. IPS manufactures its products in the United States of America and has been delivering world-class solutions to the telecommunications and parking industries for over 25 years. The company is best known for their patented credit card enabled, solar powered single-space parking meter and web-based management system.

Job Description:

The Vice President, Product Management owns product strategy, roadmap, and lifecycle management for the entire IPS portfolio, globally. Reporting to the Chief Technology Officer, this executive leads and grows the Product Management organization and is accountable for translating market needs, customer insight, and company strategy into a prioritized, well-sequenced roadmap that Engineering can execute and that Sales, Operations, and Customer Success can bring to market. 

This is a hands-on leadership role. The successful candidate is equally comfortable setting multi-year portfolio strategy for the Board and working alongside engineers and customers on the details of a release. They will establish product management as a rigorous, data-driven discipline at IPS and serve as the connective tissue between hardware, software, payments, and services.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

Product Strategy and Portfolio Ownership

• Define and own the global product strategy and multi-year roadmap across all IPS product lines and services, aligned to company growth objectives. 
• Maintain a clear, differentiated positioning for each product line, and make explicit investment, sustain, and end-of-life decisions across the portfolio. 
• Build and defend business cases for new products, major features, and platform investments, including market sizing, pricing, margin impact, and expected return. 
• Serve as the single point of accountability for portfolio trade-offs across hardware, software, payments, and services. 

Roadmap, Requirements, and Lifecycle Execution

• Translate strategy into prioritized epics, requirements, and acceptance criteria that Engineering can plan and deliver against. 
• Partner with Engineering leadership on quarterly planning, commitment, and release governance; hold the roadmap accountable to committed dates and quality standards. 
• Own product lifecycle management end to end, including new product introduction, regional launch readiness, sustaining releases, and product retirement. 
• Establish and report product performance measures — adoption, utilization, reliability, customer satisfaction, and revenue contribution. 

Customer, Market, and Competitive Insight 

• Maintain direct, continuous contact with customers and prospects across North America, the United Kingdom, Europe, and other served markets. 
• Build a durable competitive and market intelligence capability, including regulatory and standards developments affecting parking, curb management, and mobility. 
• Represent IPS with customers, partners, industry associations, and at conferences and trade shows as a credible voice on where the market is going. 
• Bring the voice of the customer into prioritization decisions in a structured, evidence-based way. 

Cross-Functional Leadership

• Partner with Sales and Marketing on go-to-market strategy, positioning, pricing, sales enablement, and support of major bids and public-sector procurements. 
• Partner with Operations, Supply Chain, and Manufacturing on hardware forecasting, cost targets, component strategy, and transition planning. 
• Partner with Customer Success and Support on onboarding, adoption, and closed-loop feedback from the installed base. 
• Provide clear, concise reporting on product strategy and performance to the executive team and the Board of Directors. 

Compliance, Security, and Standards

• Ensure product requirements reflect the regulatory and contractual obligations of the markets IPS serves, including payment industry, privacy, and accessibility requirements. 
• Partner with Security, Compliance, and Engineering so that products are designed and released consistently with IPS Group’s PCI DSS Level 1 and SOC 2 Type II compliance and applicable data protection law; specific compliance determinations rest with the Security and Compliance function and counsel. 
• Champion adoption of open and emerging industry standards where they create customer value and reduce integration friction. 

Team Leadership and Development

• Lead, coach, and grow the global Product Management organization; define roles, levels, and career paths in partnership with Human Resources. 
• Establish consistent product management practices, artifacts, and cadences across all product lines. 
• Recruit and retain senior product talent and build bench strength through deliberate development and succession planning. 
• Model collaborative, transparent leadership and hold the organization to high standards of accountability. 

Qualifications and Skills:

• Demonstrated ownership of a portfolio that combines physical hardware or connected devices with cloud software — the candidate must be credible in both. 
• Experience with payment-enabled products and a working understanding of the payments ecosystem, including card-present and digital payment acceptance. 
• Experience selling to and delivering for public-sector and institutional customers, including formal procurement, RFP response, and long sales cycles. 
• Experience owning products across multiple geographies and regulatory regimes, with the cultural awareness to operate globally. 
• Fluency in Agile delivery practices and modern product tooling; ability to work directly with engineering teams without an intermediary. 
• Strong commercial and analytical skills, including pricing, business case development, and product profitability. 
• Exceptional written and verbal communication, with the presence to brief executives, customers, and the Board. 
• Legal authorization to work in the United States and ability to travel domestically and internationally. 
  

Preferred Qualifications

• Advanced degrees such as an MBA. 
• Direct experience in parking, curb management, transportation, smart city, or adjacent mobility technology. 
• Experience in a private-equity-backed company, including diligence, acquisition integration, or preparation for a transaction. 
• Experience transitioning a portfolio toward recurring revenue, SaaS, or managed service models. 
• Experience with hardware new product introduction and regulatory or payment certification cycles. 

Leadership Competencies

• Strategic clarity. Sets a direction people can understand, believe, and act on. 
• Decisiveness. Make timely calls with incomplete information and owns the outcome. 
• Customer obsession. Grounds every decision in real customer need and measurable value. 
• Influence without authority. Aligns Engineering, Sales, Operations, and Finance behind a common plan. 
• Executional rigor. Follows through on commitments and measures what matters. 
• Talent builder. Attracts strong people and makes the people around them better. 

Education/Experience:

• Bachelor’s degree in engineering, computer science, business, or a related field. 
• Twelve or more years of product management experience, including five or more years leading product management teams, with experience managing other managers. 

Physical Demands, Equipment, and Machinery:

The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with qualified disabilities to perform the essential functions.

Sitting, standing, walking, lifting, and storing supplies and materials throughout the day. Performing work on a desktop computer requires manual dexterity to operate keyboards, calculators and photocopying equipment.

Work Environment:

This position is based on-site at the IPS Group headquarters in San Diego, California, in a standard office and laboratory environment with periodic time in manufacturing and field settings. The role requires the ability to travel up to 30 percent, including international travel, and to occasionally lift and handle product samples and equipment weighing up to 25 pounds. Reasonable accommodations will be made in accordance with applicable law. 

Note: The above statements are not intended to be an exhaustive list of all responsibilities, duties and skills required of personnel in this classification. Nothing in the job description restricts IPS Group from the right to change, assign, or reassign duties and responsibilities at any time for any reason. Furthermore, they do not establish a contract for employment as this is an "AT-Will" employer. It is the policy of IPS Group not to discriminate against any applicant for employment, or any employee because of age, color, sex, disability, national origin, race, religion, sexual orientation, or veteran status.

Benefits:

• 401(k)
• 401(k) matching
• Dental insurance
• Health insurance
• Life insurance
• Paid time off
• Vision insurance

Job Type: Full-time

An Equal Opportunity Employer—M/F/D/V