We’re Tovala, a food-tech company reinventing home cooking to save consumers time. Through an innovative combination of hardware, software, and fresh food delivery, we make it incredibly simple for anyone to prepare and enjoy delicious, home-cooked meals without sacrificing time to do whatever matters to them. Through our superior technology, product experience and food quality, we have separated Tovala from the busy pack of other meal delivery businesses. In the process, we’ve amassed a loyal, rapidly growing following and our retention, product engagement and customer NPS are all best-in-class. We’ve raised over $100mm from great investors like Left Lane Capital, Origin Ventures, Y Combinator and Comcast Ventures and have invested strongly in building a unique culture that fosters growth, personal development and camaraderie.
Position Summary:
At Tovala, product is at the heart of everything we do. We are looking for a data-forward, customer-obsessed VP of Product to lead the strategy, and execution of our product portfolio across food, hardware, software, and customer experience.
This role will lead our product team to develop a unified, insight-driven product strategy that connects deeply with our customers, empowers cross-functional teams, and accelerates our ability to test, learn, and deliver. This role will partner closely with leadership, engineering, operations, marketing, and culinary teams to ensure Tovala continues to deliver magical, differentiated experiences that retain and delight customers.
Location: Chicago, IL (Hybrid)
How you will spend your time at Tovala:
Building a unified understanding of customer pain points informed by customer insights that inform both company and product strategy
Establishing robust and repeatable customer feedback loops across a variety of interactions with customers (i.e. interviews, surveys, customer support tickets, etc)
Driving accountability for insight quality and depth, raising the bar on how we learn from our customers.
Owning and continuously refining a living, company-wide picture of customer needs and product opportunities.
Ensuring that that unified understanding of customer pain points is clearly communicated across the organization.
Developing a clear and coherent product strategy that ladders up to the overall company strategy
Synthesizing a proactive, data-informed product strategy that aligns with company goals and customer insights with strong input from product managers
Coaching our product managers to materially contribute to the strategy
Pressure-testing that strategy against the unified understanding of customer pain points
Collaborating with cross-functional partners to define priorities, success metrics, and a multi-year vision.
Leveraging the product team to translate strategy into clear roadmaps, ensuring every initiative ties back to measurable goals.
Growing and levelling up the product team
Coaching both product managers and UX research and design, defining what the standard for great product work should look like
Working with the product team, as well as software and data partners, to improve and evolve our ability to move ideas from concept to live test quickly, across the full breadth of our product
Partnering with marketing, tech, culinary, finance, and operations teams to ensure successful testing and subsequently launch of new product initiatives
About You:
Strategic product leadership: 8+ years of product management experience, including experience in direct-to-consumer (DTC) businesses with physical consumer products, ideally within food, meal delivery, grocery, or other perishable/recurring subscription categories. Proven experience leading product teams in cross-functional environments; experience at a growth-stage company preferred.
Customer obsession: Deep empathy for customers and proven ability to translate their needs into successful products.
Proven track record: Demonstrated success building product strategies, aligning stakeholders, and delivering outcomes across multiple product lines and/or in strongly cross functional environments.
Fast mover: Clearly skilled at learning and failing fast, both individually and by developing a team, and their processes and experiments, to do so as well.
Coach and mentor: Strong ability to guide and grow a product team with a variety of backgrounds and experiences
Influential communicator: Exceptional at aligning executives and teams, simplifying complexity, and ensuring clarity of direction.
Data-forward mindset: Skilled at integrating customer insights, experimentation, and quantitative analysis to guide decisions.
