Vice President, Product Management - AI, Data, and Insights

Description

Sprout Social is seeking a visionary Vice President, Product Management - AI, Data, and Insights to lead Sprout Social’s AI strategy, data science initiatives, and analytics functions. Reporting to our Chief Product Officer, this critical leadership role will be responsible for transforming how AI is integrated into our product development processes, enabling innovative solutions that push the boundaries of what’s possible. This role will lead experimentation, and foster a culture of rapid iteration at start-up speed, while simultaneously driving our AI data strategy to ensure we are developing a robust competitive moat and enabling existing products to leverage work of the AI team wherever it may be beneficial. 

Why join Sprout’s Product team?

Sprout empowers businesses worldwide to harness the immense power and opportunity of social media in today’s digital-first world. Processing over one billion social messages daily, our platform serves up essential insights and actionable information to over 30,000 brands, informing strategic decisions that drive business growth and innovation, and fostering deeper, authentic connections to their end customers. Our full suite of social media management solutions includes comprehensive publishing and engagement functionality, customer care solutions, influencer marketing, connected workflows, and business intelligence. We're actively working to intuitively weave AI throughout our products, enabling organizations to work smarter, unleash their creativity, and maximize the business impact of social media–that’s where you come in! This is an exciting opportunity for a leader on the cutting edge of AI to drive transformative change and unlock new possibilities across our expanding product ecosystem.

Our Product team operates at the intersection of strategy, innovation, customer value, and go-to-market collaboration. We are focused on delivering unified, data-driven solutions across our multi-product portfolio. As part of the broader R&D organization, our team collaborates closely with Engineering, Product Design, and Go-to-Market (GTM) teams to create impactful experiences for customers while driving measurable business outcomes. This cross-functional partnership ensures that our products not only meet technical excellence but are also positioned effectively in the market, aligning with customer needs and business growth objectives. As a leader of a dynamic set of teams, you will not only will you set the AI vision (working with the CPO, CTO and CEO), but you’ll play a pivotal role in the evolution of our overall product management practices and shaping a best-in-class product organization with a culture of operational excellence. Join other empathetic and visionary leaders on our Product Leadership team who help each other grow and learn while we guide and inspire our teams to deliver world-class products. 

What you’ll do

• You will create a vision and cutting-edge AI strategy that is innovative, ambitious, and compelling, and be a passionate evangelist for how that vision will transform how our customers find value in Sprout’s product. 
• You’ll define and execute our platform-wide AI strategy and serve as the leader of our AI teams. Working across team boundaries, you’ll help our business identify opportunities to weave artificial intelligence into our product suite and enable our customers to accomplish more with less effort with the assistance of artificial intelligence.
• As a data-driven innovator, you will build frameworks that harness data insights to fuel groundbreaking product innovations, enhance user experiences, and drive operational excellence.
• Partnering with your engineering counterparts, you’ll lead the optimization of data infrastructure and AI capabilities, enabling experimentation and rapid iteration while ensuring operational excellence.
• You’ll have a firm pulse on customer needs by actively engaging with our customers, evaluating opportunities, and driving competitive advantage. 
• You’ll collaborate closely with key partners across GTM, product management, product design, and engineering to align business goals and deepen product and go-to-market opportunities.
• You’ll transform our portfolio by managing AI and data initiatives across Sprout’s product suite, ensuring a seamless integration with our product conceptual model and platform strategy while pioneering new AI-driven capabilities.
• Utilizing your eye for identifying and developing talent, you’ll establish Sprout as a career destination for product talent. You will hire, lead, and coach leaders and product managers in your organization and support their professional growth and development to increase their impact on the organization.
• You’ll have a pulse on the latest AI industry trends and best practices, and leverage this to evaluate opportunities, increase the quality and execution time of deploying models, and advise on potential adoption to drive competitive advantage.
• You'll guide your teams to operate on a new level - working more effectively together to iteratively deliver best in class product and balance needs for critical customer pain points, all while driving continuous innovation and scaling our AI capabilities

What you’ll bring

We’re looking for an entrepreneurial and visionary product leader to help our company invest in the right capabilities to usher in the AI revolution. If you can inspire and align product teams to innovate and solve hard problems, and push them to learn from and teach each other, we'd love to talk with you!

• 12+ years of experience in AI, data science, or analytics leadership roles, with at least 5 years in a product-driven SaaS environment.
• Proven success leading AI and data initiatives in a multi-product portfolio company.
• Expertise in AI/ML technologies, data engineering, and advanced analytics infrastructure.
• Strong understanding of data governance, privacy, and compliance in SaaS products.
• Demonstrated experience developing and scaling high-performance teams through hiring and coaching of product talent

Preferred qualifications for this role include:

• Experience collaborating closely with product, design, engineering, and GTM leaders to deliver cohesive solutions.
• Ability to translate technical concepts into actionable business strategies for executive stakeholders.
• Demonstrated ability to lead large cross-functional teams and manage organizational change.
• Experience aligning teams’ focus and vision towards the most impactful work across a complex product to meet the needs of a diverse, global customer base

How you’ll grow

Within 1 month, you’ll plant your roots, including:

• Completing Sprout Social’s new hire training & onboarding program alongside other new Sprout team members. You’ll gain a broader understanding of our products and how your role fits into the organization.
• Learning the current state of AI and machine learning at Sprout, along with future product and technical roadmaps.
• Meeting your team in 1:1s to understand what’s working, what’s not, and gathering learnings to implement into your role.
• Diving into our products to learn about what makes our software unique and why customers love our products.
• Beginning to understand the capabilities and limitations of our AI and data platforms
• Establishing relationships with other product, engineering, design and revenue leaders and identifying areas of opportunity.
• Get hands-on with Sprout’s products, experiencing them from the customer’s perspective.

Within 3 months, you’ll start hitting your stride by:

• Partnering with senior R&D leadership to define key success metrics for your role and teams and how you will measure against them.
• Participate in architectural discussions and decisions, asking the right questions to guide your team to successful outcomes.
• Participating in quarterly planning and roadmap processes and helping your teams shape the product roadmap for long-term success.
• Assuming management of the team's product managers. Meet with them regularly and provide them with direct, constructive feedback on their work, as well as formulating career growth plans.
• Helping your teams improve processes and team rituals.
• Understanding the inputs/outputs of the business and developing a perspective on where we can improve.
• Getting acclimated to the hiring process and guiding your teams through establishing the staffing plan and process.
• Implementing your own rituals for managing and reporting to the business to ensure we have transparency and accountability throughout the roadmap.

Within 6 months, you’ll be making a clear impact through:

• Owning Sprout’s influencer marketing roadmap and delivering measurable results on key strategic initiatives.
• Guiding and proactively evaluating your teams’ execution with your leaders on a major feature launch.
• Identify key opportunities to improve cross-team collaboration and alignment.
• Leading the performance review and career band calibration process for your leaders, and coach your leaders through performance conversations with the teams.
• Evangelizing our AI product vision with internal and external stakeholders.
• Measuring initial process improvements and making adjustments where appropriate.
• Stepping up as a leader to share best practices across the Product organization and help others grow from your experiences.
• Becoming an expert in our approach to AI and to confidently speak to ever-changing trends, new product features and platform enhancements to internal and external stakeholders

Within 12 months, you’ll make this role your own by:

• Having development plans in place for your teams and holding them accountable.
• Consistently meeting and exceeding established performance targets.
• Helping to hone the product management processes across your teams.
• Continue to develop your team, both personally and professionally.
• Obtaining (solicited and unsolicited) and acting upon peer, customer, and leadership feedback.
• Continue to evolve Sprout’s product culture, shaping the next generation of product leaders.
• Being recognized as a subject matter expert and leader in artificial intelligence at Sprout.
• Surprise us! Use your unique ideas and abilities to change AI and our analytical capabilities in Sprout in beneficial ways that we haven’t even considered yet!

Of course what is outlined above is the ideal timeline, but things may shift based on business needs and other projects and tasks could be added at the discretion of your manager.

Our Benefits Program

We’re proud to regularly be recognized for our team, product and culture. Our benefits program includes:

• Insurance and benefit options that are built for both individuals and families
• Progressive policies to support work/life balance, like our flexible paid time off and parental leave program 
• High-quality and well-maintained equipment—your computer will never prevent you from doing your best
• Wellness initiatives to ensure both health and mental well-being of our team
• Ongoing education and development opportunities via our Grow@Sprout program and employee-led diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.
• Growing corporate social responsibility program that is driven by the involvement and passion of our team members
• Beautiful, convenient, and state-of-the-art offices in Chicago’s Loop and downtown Seattle, for those who prefer an office setting

Whenever possible, Sprout wants to provide our team with the flexibility to work in the location that makes the most sense for them. Sprout maintains a remote workforce in many places in the United States. However, we are not set up in all states, so please look at the drop-down box in our application to see whether your state is listed. Few roles require an office setting. If your position requires a physical presence in a Sprout office, it will be evident in the job listing and your offer letter.

The base pay range for this role is $300,000 to $375,000 USD annually. Individual base pay is based on various factors, including relevant experience and skills, the responsibility of the role, and job duties/requirements. In addition to base pay, some Sales and Success roles can earn sales incentives. 

Sprout’s compensation ranges are intentionally broad to allow for our team members' growth within their role. These ranges were determined by a market-based compensation approach; we used data from trusted third-party compensation sources to set equitable, consistent and competitive ranges. We also evaluate compensation bi-annually, identify any changes in the market and make adjustments to our ranges and existing employee compensation as needed.

Base pay is only one element of an employee's total compensation at Sprout. Every Sprout team member has an opportunity to receive restricted stock units (RSUs) under Sprout’s equity plan. Employees (and their dependents) are covered by medical, dental, vision, basic life, accidental death, and dismemberment insurance, and Modern Health (a wellness benefit).  Employees are able to enroll in Sprout’s company’s 401k plan, in which Sprout will match 50% of your contributions up to 6% with a maximum contribution. Sprout offers “Flexible Paid Time Off” and ten paid holidays. We have outlined the various components to an employee’s full compensation package here to help you to understand our total rewards package.

Sprout Social is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer and an Affirmative Action Employer. We do not discriminate based on identity- race, color, religion, national origin or ancestry, sex (including sexual identity), age, physical or mental disability, pregnancy, veteran or military status, unfavorable discharge from military service, genetic information, sexual orientation, marital status, order of protection status, citizenship status, arrest record or expunged or sealed convictions, or any other legally recognized protected basis under federal, state, or local law. Learn more about our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion in our latest DEI Report.

If you need a reasonable accommodation for any part of the employment process, please contact us by email at accommodations@sproutsocial.com and let us know the nature of your request and your contact information. We'll do all we can to ensure you're set up for success during our interview process while upholding your privacy, including requests for accommodation. Please note that only inquiries concerning a request for reasonable accommodation will be responded to from this email address.

For more information about our commitment to equal employment opportunity, please click here (1) Equal Opportunity Employment Poster  (2) Sprout Social's Affirmative Action Statement (3) Pay Transparency Statement. 

When you apply for employment with Sprout Social, we will process your job applicant data, including your employment and education history, transcript, writing samples, and references as necessary to consider your job application for open positions. Your personal data will be shared with Greenhouse Software, Inc., and Crosschq, Inc., cloud services providers located in the United States of America and engaged by Sprout Social to help manage its recruitment and hiring process on Controller’s behalf. Accordingly, if you are located outside of the United States, by clicking “Submit Application” on this site, you consent to the transfer of your personal data to the United States. For more information about our privacy practices please visit our Privacy Policy. California residents have additional rights and should review the Additional Disclosures for California Residents section in our Privacy Policy.

Additionally, Sprout Social participates in the E-Verify program in certain locations, as required by law. 

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