Senior Director, Product & Innovation

About Willmeng Arizona-based Willmeng Construction is a 100-percent employee-owned general contractor that has been dedicated to helping our people build their “Genuine Place of Purpose” since 1977. We prioritize our exceptional company culture, which has us ranked in the Top 5 of the Phoenix Business Journal’s Best Places to Work for more than a decade and made us the only Arizona construction firm on the Inc. Best Workplaces list for three consecutive years. We have earned multiple appearances on AZ Big Media’s Most Admired Companies list, and ranked No. 1 for Healthiest Employers for two consecutive years. Our people and our culture have also created an atmosphere that encourages going above and beyond for our clients and our community. Our team’s dedication to its craft has earned us NAIOP (CREDA) Arizona General Contractor of the Year six times, while at the same time donating more than $1 million annually to community organizations. Our strategic vision focuses on supporting prelease transactions, competitively bidding projects of all sizes, and fostering our altruistic service culture by recruiting highly talented individuals of great character who want to make a genuine impact on our communities. The Role The Senior Director, Product & Innovation leads Willmeng's first product organization, reporting to the Chief Innovation Officer. This leader partners with the CIO to set product vision and strategy, then builds the operating structure, process, and team that carry a product from idea to a fully supported, adopted release. The role leads an AI-first engineering team and Product Managers embedded in Finance, Business Operations, and Construction Operations. It requires real product and technical depth, including a software development background, fluency in Agile practices, and a working understanding of application architecture. Most products serve Willmeng's own estimators, project teams, and field staff. This role is office-based at Willmeng's Arizona headquarters. What you will accomplish Product strategy & ownership Partner with the Chief Innovation Officer to refine and extend the product vision by bringing operational and end-user insight, then translate it into a roadmap across Willmeng's internal software initiatives and own its execution. Confirm the intended value of each initiative with its end users before committing engineering resources, document it as the initiative's objective, and measure the delivered product against it at launch and throughout its lifecycle. Build and apply a return-on-product framework for each initiative, recognizing that return may be financial, operational, or human (time saved, safety, employee health, retention). Define product stages (MVP, alpha, beta, general availability) and the criteria required to move from one to the next. People leadership & development Lead the Dev Team Lead and all Product Managers with daily, hands-on coaching. Develop the engineering team's product and engineering discipline over time, including specs, backlog management, sprint cadence, and QA, while keeping AI capabilities central to how they work. Build Willmeng's product management discipline from the ground up, including PRDs, user stories, acceptance criteria, and a shared vocabulary for the whole team. Recruit, hire, and develop additional Product Managers as new verticals are added. Process & product lifecycle Establish Willmeng's first formal product development lifecycle, from idea through spec, build, alpha, beta, and a fully supported release. Introduce lightweight, right-sized Agile practices for a small in-house team. Weigh in on application architecture decisions alongside the Dev Team Lead and engineers to judge whether a technical approach supports the roadmap and long-term maintainability. Define measurable success criteria for every product at launch and after, and hold the team accountable to a real support and maintenance plan so that adoption is the standard for “done.” Cross-functional & executive partnership Manage Product Managers embedded in Finance, Business Operations, and Construction Operations, each with a dotted-line relationship to the CFO, CBO, and operations leadership respectively, and ensure product priorities reflect the real needs of those functions. Partner directly with the CFO, CBO, operations leadership, and other business leaders to keep products under development mapped to genuine business priorities. Report regularly to the Chief Innovation Officer on product portfolio health, adoption, and return. Product craft & domain fluency Build working fluency in Willmeng's core business, including estimating, preconstruction, field operations, and delivery in technical markets such as semiconductor, data center, and healthcare, to judge whether a product solves a real operational problem. Apply core product management craft (discovery, prioritization, feedback loops, outcome-based road mapping) adapted for an internal, general-contractor customer base. What we would like you to have A background in software development or technical product management, with real fluency in Agile methodology and enough application architecture knowledge to hold credible conversations with engineers about technical tradeoffs. Experience building in-house proprietary software for use by internal stakeholders.