Director of Product Development

## Description
**ESSENTIAL DUTIES**
**Product Vision & AMMI Platform Leadership**

• Own the product vision, strategy, and multi-year roadmap for AMMI, ensuring it evolves into an industry-leading, AI-enabled logistics toolkit.
• Define and prioritize the product backlog based on SPEED impact, business value, customer need, and technical feasibility.
• Serve as the internal champion for AMMI—articulating the platform’s value to internal stakeholders, leadership, and external partners.
• Establish product governance and sprint cadence frameworks that align development velocity with enterprise priorities.
• Translate the EASE growth strategy into a phased, deliverable-driven product roadmap with measurable outcomes tied to SPEED, customer retention, and operational leverage.
• Drive product discovery and user research processes to ensure AMMI capabilities are built in response to real operational needs and market opportunities.

**AI Strategy & Innovation**

• Co-own EASE’s enterprise AI strategy alongside the CSO, establishing a clear framework for how AI capabilities are identified, evaluated, integrated, and measured.
• Lead the identification, evaluation, and management of AI vendors and technology partners, ensuring EASE maintains access to cutting-edge capabilities.
• Build AMMI as a genuinely AI-native platform—embedding machine learning, predictive analytics, intelligent automation, and decision-support capabilities throughout the product stack.
• Champion an experimental mindset across the product and development organization: hypothesis-driven development, rapid prototyping, structured pilots, and data-informed iteration.
• Stay ahead of emerging AI trends in logistics and adjacent industries, translating market signals into actionable product investments.
• Establish EASE’s internal AI governance framework, including model performance standards, responsible AI practices, and adoption measurement.

**Build, Buy, & Partner Decisions**

• Own the build/buy/partner decision framework for new product capabilities, working closely with the CSO to evaluate the optimal path to each new capability.
• Lead structured assessments of third-party solutions, open-source tooling, and partner integrations as alternatives or complements to internal development.
• Evaluate and manage AI and technology vendor relationships, including capability assessments, commercial negotiation, performance accountability, and integration roadmaps.
• Ensure all vendor and partner engagements are governed with clear SLAs, ROI expectations, and strategic alignment criteria.
• Maintain a living technology partnership roadmap that reflects current integration priorities, partner performance, and evolving strategic fit.

**Resource Strategy & Team Leadership**

• Lead and develop a high-performing internal product and engineering team, setting clear expectations, fostering a culture of accountability, and enabling team members to grow.
• Design and implement a blended development resource model that strategically combines in-house talent with external development capacity to accelerate delivery and manage cost.
• Manage external product development relationships, including performance oversight, scope management, and quality assurance, ensuring external teams operate as seamless extensions of the internal team.
• Define onboarding standards, development norms, and collaboration practices that unify internal and external contributors under a shared operating model.
• Partner with Finance and the CSO to manage the product development budget, forecasting capacity needs and balancing investment across internal headcount and external resources.

**Data Science & Analytics**

• Own EASE’s data science capability, building internal expertise and platform infrastructure that transforms raw logistics data into predictive insight and autonomous action.
• Lead the design and development of ML models, intelligent pricing tools, operational forecasting capabilities, and other data-driven product features within AMMI.
• Establish a data product strategy that treats EASE’s proprietary data as a strategic asset—defining how it is captured, structured, surfaced, and operationalized.
• Champion the use of data and experimentation in product decision-making, embedding A/B testing, analytics instrumentation, and model performance monitoring into the development lifecycle.
• Ensure data science work is tightly connected to operational outcomes, with a clear line from model or feature to SPEED impact.

**Pricing Science & Predictive Cost Modeling**

• Own the design, development, and continuous improvement of EASE's pricing science systems, including predictive cost models, dynamic rate engines, and margin optimization tools embedded within AMMI.
• Lead the development of carrier cost prediction and lane-level pricing models that enable EASE to price with speed, accuracy, and confidence across all freight modes and markets.
• Build and maintain a feedback loop between operational outcomes and pricing models—continuously retraining and improving model accuracy using real shipment, cost, and margin data.
• Partner with Sales, Operations, and Finance to ensure pricing science capabilities are integrated into quoting workflows, sales tools, and executive reporting.
• Build product capabilities that support and accelerate the RFP response process—enabling cost estimates to be generated faster, with greater accuracy, and with reduced manual processing effort.
• Establish model performance standards, drift monitoring, and governance practices that ensure pricing models remain accurate, explainable, and aligned with business objectives.

**SPEED Ownership & Product Performance**

• Treat SPEED (Shipments Per Ease Employee Daily) as the defining product KPI—ensuring every feature, release, and investment decision is evaluated against its anticipated contribution to SPEED.
• Define product OKRs and delivery metrics that create a clear feedback loop between product development activity and measurable business outcomes.
• Establish release cadence and product performance review processes that drive continuous improvement and hold the roadmap accountable to quarterly targets.
• Partner with Operations and Sales to validate that new capabilities are adopted effectively and delivering intended value in the field.
• Report to the CSO and executive leadership on product performance, roadmap progress, development velocity, and SPEED contributions.
• Develop and maintain win/loss analytics capabilities within AMMI that give Sales and leadership accurate, timely insight into bid outcomes, pricing competitiveness, and revenue conversion patterns.

**Cross-Functional Collaboration**

• Partner closely with the VP, Technology to ensure seamless alignment between new product development and the underlying systems, infrastructure, and internal tools that support them.
• Collaborate with Sales, Customer Operations, and Marketing to ensure AMMI capabilities are understood, positioned, and adopted effectively.
• Serve as a bridge between the technical and business domains—translating complex product and AI concepts into clear commercial and operational narratives for non-technical stakeholders.
• Contribute to EASE’s go-to-market strategy by providing technical and product depth for sales enablement, RFP responses, and customer engagements where AMMI is a differentiator.
• Partner with Sales and Operations to embed RFP response tooling into AMMI workflows, reducing the time and manual effort required to produce competitive, data-backed bids.

**KPIs, Performance & Measurement**

• Define, monitor, and enforce accountability for KPIs related to system performance, uptime, project delivery, security, and deliverable outcomes.
• Responsible for tracking product budget, forecasting, and spend.
• Use data-driven insights to guide decision-making and continuous improvement.

**Leadership and Supervisory Responsibilities**

• Lead and mentor the Product Development function, including internal engineers, product managers, data scientists, and external development resources.
• Establish a high-accountability team culture grounded in EASE’s manifesto: execution is necessary, results are mandatory.
• Create and maintain clear performance expectations, sprint cadences, and delivery commitments for all product development resources.
• Partner with the executive team to ensure product strategy is tightly integrated with corporate strategy, commercial priorities, and operational goals.
• Submit monthly leadership reports no later than the 7th calendar