Chief of Staff Director, Product

The Product team listens to our customers’ needs and translates those insights into a clear product vision. The team works closely with design, engineering, and analytics to build scalable financial products that empower people to manage their money with confidence. We rely on empathy, curiosity, and business sense to prioritize features and improve experiences. Our role is to lead with clarity, support cross-functional execution, and champion the user in every decision.

The Chief of Staff to the SVP of Product is the strategic thought partner and proxy to the leader. The role exists to scale the product leadership function: by anchoring on the leveraged people problems most central to the org, by owning the external product narrative end-to-end, and by being on point for strategic bets that need a single accountable owner (ex: AI enablement, special projects).

The end goal is a healthy Product org with pillar leads running independently at high quality, decisions made with less latency, and a clearer story about where Product is going, and why.

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  Design and run the product leadership team’s rhythms (staff meetings, product reviews, all-teams, offsites): agenda architecture, pre-reads, decision capture, follow-through

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  Co-own the people rhythms with the HRBP across hiring, calibrations, performance, and talent reviews. Surface emergent structural risks (broken hiring funnels, attrition signals, single points of failure) with proactive solutions

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  Partners with Technology Operations function to define and improve processes for roadmap planning, driving prioritization decisions, setting annual OKRs and tracking progress to goals throughout the year 

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  Own headcount planning and budget management alongside the Finance and HR Business Partners: annual planning, quarterly reforecasts, hire-prioritization tradeoffs

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  Drive AI retooling and enablement, including running internal AI masterclasses for leadership and natively embedding AI-enabled processes across the function

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  Curate the external product narrative (all-hands, written updates, major external talks): operate as a speechwriter, partnering with PR, comms, and brand

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  Prepare executive briefings and leadership communications, and reduce decision latency across the Product leadership team

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  Run a recurring org health pulse (engagement scores, regrettable attrition, leveling drift, manager effectiveness), escalating early signals before they become structural problems

• 10+ years in roles that built product credibility and strategic-narrative chops: strategy with deep product partnership, or a prior CoS role to a senior product or engineering executive at a high-growth tech company

• A track record of running people processes at scale (hiring, calibrations, leveling, talent reviews) in a fast-growing organization

• Exceptional written communication: you can ghostwrite, synthesize narrative from raw inputs, and draft a board page that holds up under scrutiny

• Pattern-matching for organizational dysfunction: the muscle to spot a broken hiring funnel, a single point of failure, or a leadership gap before anyone names it

• Comfort operating with influence and without authority across senior leaders in Product, Engineering, Design, Revenue, Finance, and HR

• Strong analytical foundation and business acumen: fluent enough in product metrics, financials, and growth analytics to reason about tradeoffs without delegating every quantitative question

Affirm’s next phase of growth depends on Product moving from a function powered by heroics to a function powered by a world-class operating system. The Chief of Staff is the linchpin of the strategic side of that change: the partner who helps make the strategy clear, the org stronger, and the leader’s leverage real.