VP, Product

Smalls is on a mission to make nine lives ten, building a brand and a digital experience that cat people genuinely love. Our website and product aren't just a storefront; they're the clearest expression of who we are and the engine of our growth. This role owns both.

We're looking for a VP of Product & Engineering to set the vision for our digital product, digital experience, and the technology that powers them — and to be accountable for the business results that vision delivers. Reporting to Ed (SVP, Growth & Data), you'll sit on the leadership team and act as the connective tissue between what we want the business to become and what we build to get there.

• Define a multi-year vision for our digital product and the platform beneath it, and turn it into a roadmap the team can rally around.

• Decide where to invest, what to build, and how team resourcing and tech stack need to shift to support that roadmap.

• Tie every call to the long-term vision and financial goals of the overall business in a way that is clear and motivating for the teams you lead.

• Hold the vision and the bar for everything a customer touches once they reach us — the onsite experience, paths to purchase and checkout, the account and subscription experience, and the product surfaces that keep them coming back.

• Bring a real perspective on how UX, merchandising, and onsite flows shape behavior, and make sure the experience we ship reflects the brand at its best.

• Own the product and experience metrics that ladder up to revenue — conversion, AOV, LTV, retention — and feel personally accountable for the topline you influence.

• Bring that commercial lens into every prioritization decision; be as fluent in the economics of the business as in the product.

• Build a shared agenda with Marketing across acquisition, retention, and reactivation.

• Bring a strong point of view on how product and brand compound each other to grow the business.

• Set the technical direction and build an org that ships with quality and speed.

• Make the build-vs-buy and platform calls, keep the stack healthy, and make sure engineering is pointed squarely at what matters most.

• Attract, develop, and motivate a cross‑functional product and engineering org.

• Get the best out of your people, put resources where they'll have the most impact, and create a culture where ambitious builders do the best work of their careers.

• You lead with a point of view: you arrive with a bold, well-formed take on the experience and where it should go. You can describe a future others can't yet see and build the organizational conviction to chase it — while staying honest enough to update when the evidence says you're wrong.

• You start from the customer: your strategy is grounded in a genuine understanding of who you're building for. You use data, testing, and research to sharpen your bets, not to make them for you.

• You're commercial: you think in business outcomes and are comfortable being measured by them. You can articulate the tradeoff between a long-term experience investment and this quarter's number to anyone in the building, including the board.

• You've scaled consumer commerce: you've built and grew across DTC subscription and traditional ecommerce, and understand what changes when a subscription‑first business opens up to one‑time purchase and subscribe‑and‑save. You know the modern DTC stack well, Shopify included, and carry enough technical depth to set engineering direction and earn your engineers' trust.

• You operate at the product–marketing seam: you've owned the place where growth, brand, and product…