Riipen is building the infrastructure that connects education to real work at scale, unlocking new possibilities for learners, employers, and institutions to create meaningful, outcome-driven experiences together. When this works well, learners graduate with real skills and proof of capability, employers access talent in new and effective ways, and institutions demonstrate clear and measurable impact.
This role exists to make that system work consistently, at scale, and with integrity.
The Senior Vice President of Product owns the decisions that determine what Riipen builds, what it scales, what it redesigns, and what it stops. These decisions must simultaneously drive revenue growth, sustain margin, deliver reliable outcomes, and stand up to external scrutiny through evidence.
This is not a roadmap ownership role. It is authority over a product system that must work in the real world across diverse stakeholders and environments.
When this role is working well, Riipen delivers experiences that consistently produce measurable outcomes, the organization is aligned around a focused portfolio, and every product decision strengthens both economic performance and external credibility.
Responsibilities include, but are not limited to;
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Own product strategy and portfolio decisions across all lines of business and delivery models
- Ensure Riipen’s product portfolio aligns with the operating system and scales without exception debt
- Define and evolve delivery models and experience design that produce meaningful and measurable outcomes for learners employers and partners
- Ensure every product line meets or is on a path to meeting revenue growth, margin sustainability, and outcome reliability thresholds
- Define leading quality gates that determine what scales and what requires redesign or exit
- Make explicit deprecation decisions including stopping offerings without replacement readiness
- Ensure deprecation is executed cleanly with clear communication and organizational alignment
- Integrate Research and Impact as a core input into product decision making, not a downstream validation function
- Ensure product decisions are informed by credible evidence and can be supported externally with partners, governments, and institutions
- Partner with Research and Impact to define what outcomes must be demonstrated, how they are measured, and how that evidence informs product evolution
- Ensure the voice of learners, employers, academic institutions, educators, workforce partners, and government stakeholders is consistently reflected in product decisions
- Build and enforce structured customer research practices including interviews, feedback loops, and insight systems across all segments
- Translate stakeholder insight into clear product tradeoffs rather than reactive changes or incremental expansion
- Own product data priorities aligned to concrete decisions such as what to scale redesign or exit
- Partner with Ops to ensure quality standards are enforceable operationalized and consistently applied
- Partner with Revenue and Employer to ensure commercial narratives and employer readiness reflect actual product capability
- Define the boundaries of what can and cannot be sold or delivered based on product reality
- Provide clear product tradeoffs and portfolio rationale to the executive team and board
- Ensure teams understand where to invest energy and where to let go
- Continuously reduce complexity across the product portfolio to improve focus speed and outcomes
- Product strategy and portfolio management across all offerings
- Delivery model definition and evolution
- Quality gate definition in partnership with Ops
- Research and Impact integration into product decisions and evidence development
- Customer research systems and stakeholder insight integration
- Product data prioritization tied to decision making
- Deprecation and portfolio simplification
These aren’t hard requirements, but will be indicators that guide our search.
You may be a good fit if you:
- Have owned portfolio level decisions where stopping work was as important as starting it
- Have a track record of building products that deliver both strong economic outcomes and meaningful real world impact
- Can integrate research, data, and stakeholder insight into clear product decisions rather than treating them as separate functions
- Have built or led systems for continuous customer research across multiple stakeholder groups
- Can define quality in ways that are observable enforceable and scalable
- Use data and evidence to decide what to scale redesign or exit rather than justify existing plans
- Are comfortable making irreversible decisions with incomplete information
- Can align executive stakeholders around hard tradeoffs without creating drift
- See focus, evidence, and deprecation as acts of stewardship that strengthen the company
- Value a transparent, inclusive, and feedback-oriented culture and believe strong architectures empower people, not constrain them.
We ask that if you feel like you don’t check all the boxes but have the potential to learn what you don’t know, that you still apply! We believe that diverse teams are high-performing teams and we strive to employ individuals with a diversity of backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives.
If this role excites you, we look forward to receiving your application!
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Remote/travel working opportunities (when appropriate)
- 4-weeks of annual vacation
- Extended Health and Dental benefits from your first day
- Flexible health spending account
- Work from home stipend
We appreciate your interest and application. Only those applicants under consideration will be contacted.
Riipen is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer. Employment decisions are based on merit and business needs, and not on race, colour, creed, age, sex, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, religion, marital status, medical condition, physical or mental disability, military service, pregnancy, childbirth and related medical conditions or any other classification protected by federal, state or provincial and local laws and ordinances.
Reasonable accommodation is available for qualified individuals with disabilities, upon request.
Conceptualized by Dana Stephenson and Dave Savory for their capstone entrepreneurship project at the University of Victoria, Riipen addressed an issue that they faced personally as learners — the challenge of gaining relevant work experience, building a network of possible employers, and then demonstrating their skills to that network in order to find work that would help them start their careers. They were facing the graduation conundrum — You can’t get a job without experience, but you can’t get experience without a job.
Since inception in 2013, Riipen has expanded its reach internationally and has developed a state of the art technology platform that caters and provides significant competitive advantages for organizations and academic institutions while staying true to their original goal of supporting student development. Riipen has enabled 193,000+ students at 590+ post-secondary institutions and training providers to partake in applied learning with 31,000+ companies. All of this leads us to our mission: Eliminate Underemployment.
