VP Product

Zeren have partnered with Robin AI to appoint a their first product leader, to help scale following initial product-market fit, and help move into new verticals.

With a unique route to market and a successsful service line, Robin AI are well positioned to build an end to end contract management platform leveraging best-in-class AI and ML technologies for mid-market enterprise customers.

We are seeking a player-coach product leader with expeinece in scaling hollistic SaaS products, simplifying complexity and disrupting legacy industries. 

Context

Historically, Robin AI has sold legal services to customers in the private equity industry. They have a team of lawyers and paralegals who negotiate contracts on behalf of some of the biggest funds and asset managers in the world. However, the company’s ambition has always been to build contract software that will replace Microsoft Word as the default tool for drafting and negotiating contracts. By providing a world class legal service, they have accumulated significant amounts of proprietary contract data that they have used (and continue to use) to train highly accurate machine learning models that underpin our contract software platform.

The platform is made up of three core modules:

1. Draft: A tool that helps companies draft legal contracts from structured contract templates, rather than unstructured Word documents;
2. Review: A tool that accelerates contract negotiation by suggesting changes to contracts based on a company’s preferred positions, using machine learning; and
3. Query: A tool that helps people find information inside contracts they’ve signed, using machine learning

Robin AI are now in a position to begin to sell their contract software as a standalone product. They are planning to release a free self-service version of our platform throughout the course of Q1, as well as a Word Plug-in of our Review module.
The product focuses on three customer cohorts:

Why do they need a Product Leader now?

1. Self-Serve Customers: Small and medium sized businesses who are content with free or low cost, generic contract software (e.g. generic contract templates, generic contract playbooks), and potential buyers of software products trying the system for the first time;
2. Platform Customers (e.g. Repligen): Companies across a range of industries, with between £10m – £1bn of annual revenues, < 10,000 employees and want a software product with similar features to those offered by contract lifecycle management tools (ACV: £35,000); and
3. Specialist Workflows (e.g. Bain Capital): Companies within specific, targeted industries (Alternative Assets, Financial Services, Insurance and Biotech) where we can up-sell high value features that accelerate contract workflows (ACV: £100k).

Historically, Robin AI have been focussed on building an outstanding managed legal service that utilises this software – so have only begun to sell their software over the last few months.

Now they are formally launching the product to a broad group of users, it's time for their first product leader to help advance the Product function, manage and build the team (who are each overseeing different product ‘Squads’), and to drive the product roadmap based on user feedback. In particular, advances in machine learning – and specifically, large language models from companies like GPT3 and Anthropic – present a huge opportunity for Robin to build product experiences that were previously unimaginable.

About you:

We’re looking for an experienced Product veteran who understands how to hire and grow teams that can build a relatively complex B2B software products. The successful candidate will – as a minimum expectation – need to have all of the credentials and experience expected of a seasoned product practitioner. This includes an excellent grasp of software product development, experience directing teams of engineers and designers, an understanding of the need to work with multiple different cross-functional stakeholders and a familiarity with concepts used in SCRUM.

More particulary, it would be highly desirable if the successful candidate had experience working with products that use machine learning, and ideally natural language processing. These technologies form a core part of the Robin AI product, and understanding the potential (and limitations) of these technologies will help the candidate shape the product roadmap in an ambitious and realistic way.

In addition, we’re looking for a candidate who is used to building complex products that are realtively simple to use. Our audience (lawyers) are relatively unsophisticated software users, but highly intelligent, professional and with significant demands on their time. 

We do not think it is necessary for the candidate to have any experience with or background in the law, nor do they need to have any real knowledge of contracts. Robin AI will provide all of the learning that will be necessary in this regard, and a truly good candidate will learn this fairly quickly. It is however necessary that the candidate enjoys talking to and learning directly from customers, and feels confident in their ability to interrogate users and prospective users about their problems.