Vice President Product, Emerging Markets

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 4000 red-light speed and school bus stop arm safety cameras across North America. We are also creating smart roadways serving the worlds 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 Mobilitys venture builder for opportunities that fall outside existing business units but have the potential to become significant new revenue streamswhether through new products new customer segments new channels or adjacent mobility mandate is not to build long roadmaps but to generate validated learning and commercial traction through rapid discoverydelivery loopsfailing 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 innovationtransforming ambiguous crossfunctional problems into clear testable concepts with the potential to scale. Success is measured by the quality of decisions the pace of learning and realworld traction: customer value willingnesstopay signals scalable gotomarket pathways and operational/regulatory feasibility. What matters isnt the number of experimentsits the speed and rigor with which ideas are validated derisked and converted into viable businesses.

Product Operating Model:
This role institutionalizes a modern Product Operating Model for incubationempowered crossfunctional product teams that own outcomes iterate continuously and operate with explicit decision rights and evidencedriven 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.

Key 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 reprioritized opportunity backlogframed 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 smallbet budgets establishing evidencebased 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 willingnesstopay - 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 learningvelocity 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 pipelinewhile avoiding metrics that reward experiment volume over insight.
• Drive disciplined risk testing: ensuring teams validate the critical risks up frontvalue 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 qualityhelp teams ship quickly while protecting the integrity of the customer experience.
• Set up evidencebased investment governance: use clear stage gates decision rights funding steps and datadriven 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: pressuretest 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 oneoff 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 decisionsenabling the organization to build on shared knowledge instead of reinventing or repeating past missteps.

Ideal Candidate Competencies

• Customer Focus: Deeply committed to understanding emerging customer segments uncovering latent needs and driving validated learning.
• Strategic Vision: Able to define a compelling emerging markets strategy grounded in market signals competitive landscapes and technology shifts.
• Entrepreneurial Mindset: Operates with the urgency and creativity of a startup founderresourceful scrappy decisive and hypothesis-driven.
• Product Incubation Expertise: Demonstrated success incubating 01 products building MVPs designing experiments and validating new markets.
• Evidence-Based Decision Making: Uses data research prototypes and pilots to make timely high-quality decisions.
• Organizational Builder: Strong track record of building diverse empowered cross-functional product teams.
• Innovation Leadership: Creates systems that accelerate learning reduce risk and generate repeatable patterns for product innovation.
• Executive Communication: Skilled in influencing across the C-suite articulating opportunities trade-offs and strategic implications with clarity and empathy.
• Product Operating Model Leadership: Proven track record of creating empowered outcomedriven product teams with clear decision authority and strong crossfunctional collaboration across Product Design and Engineering.
• Portfolio & Bet Discipline: Skilled in running a disciplined venture portfoliodriving small smart bets; fast learning cycles; evidencebased stop/pivot/scale decisions; and scaling only when traction is real.
• Systems Thinking & Integration: Adept at architecting how earlystage ventures move from incubation to scale aligning platform operational regulatory and GTM requirements into a cohesive path.

Qualifications

• 10 years in Product Management Innovation Strategy or related functions with 5 years building and leading product teams.
• Bachelors degree in Business Computer Science or a related field of study.
• Proven experience developing 01 products validating new markets and driving early-stage product development cycles.
• Background in B2B SaaS platforms IoT mobility telematics or adjacent innovation-focused domains in highly regulated markets preferred.
• 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: Handson 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 doesnt.