Head of Product

Type:: Full-time

Location: Remote, with a preference for candidates located in NY, TX, MD, or GA

Compensation: $140,000 - $180,000

Job Level: Director/VP (depending on experience)

ABOUT LEMONTREE

There are more food pantries in the US than there are McDonalds, but most families facing hunger don’t take that help. That’s why we started Lemontree–because it makes no sense for our neighbors to go hungry when there’s free food around the corner. We’ve helped one million households access the free food in their communities by bringing technology + empathy to the experience of food assistance. Learn more about us at https://www.foodhelpline.org/about.

Our Values

Service Over Self

We put the mission — helping people find food — ahead of ego, credit, or agenda. That means caring for the people we serve and the team around us, and going the extra mile when it makes a real difference. We're here for the work itself and what it makes possible for others. 

Ownership

We get shit done and we carry our piece so the whole team can move forward. When we make a mistake, we name it early and openly, because a problem we've owned out loud is one we can fix together. In a growing org, this kind of autonomy & accountability is how we do big things with a small team.

Curiosity
We don’t take anything for granted. We stay curious about our users and ourselves. We stay humble enough to accept that there’s always room to improve. We stay ready to change course when the evidence points somewhere new. The plan we have today is a strong draft, but we’ll always need to adapt to a changing world. We'd rather ask the better question and adjust than defend a stale answer.

THE POSITION

Lemontree is looking for a Head of Product & Technology that will partner with the Executive Director to own and evolve our platform strategy to scale our impact. Since 2020, we’ve grown from a simple helpline into a platform that serves thousands of families, partners, and volunteers daily. What we need now is someone who can shepherd us to the next level, bringing rigor and direction to how we evolve: sharper prioritization, better use of our data, and clearer decision-making & process around where we invest our resources. Every decision we make should align with our strategic anchors:

1. User-centered
2. Hospitality in every interaction
3. Built for scale

This is a hands-on leadership role with high trust and high agency, reporting to the Executive Director. You'll be the person setting product direction and leading the charge to move it forward, partnering with an engineering agency on execution and collaborating closely across our broader Lemontree team. While product ownership is the focus, this is a multi-disciplinary position that combines product management, data analysis, and technical leadership to build toward stability and scalability. If you like operating with real autonomy and are motivated to take things from 1 → 100, this role will suit you.

What You'll Do

Drive technical leadership that delivers a reliable, joyful, scalable user experience for neighbors looking for food assistance.

• Serve as a credible technical voice in conversations about architecture, tradeoffs, and feasibility.
• Direct our engineering agency, translating product priorities into well-scoped technical work and holding a high bar for what ships.
• Oversee third party services that support our product, including setting up integrations, managing billing, negotiating nonprofit discounts, etc.

Own a product roadmap that increases the breadth & depth of our impact, aligned with our organizational strategy.

• Partner with CEO & senior leadership to shape overall strategy & product direction. Rather than making every single product decision, you will own the process that helps those decisions happen with the right information, clear accountability, and strong follow-through.
• Define and prioritize product roadmap, ensuring usability, reliability, and scalability. We don't expect you to arrive with all the answers. We do expect you to ask good questions.
• Oversee end-to-end product lifecycle management — from planning, requirement gathering, and design to deployment and maintenance. Maintain a reliable source of truth for priorities, roadmap status, key decisions, risks, dependencies, and open questions.

Lead our data & evaluation strategy to inform how our product evolves and how we measure our impact.

• Lead our data strategy. We collect meaningful signals from the families and partners we serve, and we want someone who can turn it into decisions, not just dashboards.
• Define useful measures of success and use qualitative and quantitative evidence to understand whether our work is having the intended effect.
• Support teammates who are seeking answers to questions that inform their work.

Support cross-team communication & organizational decision-making infrastructure.

• Build the cross-functional trust that makes great product work possible. Collaborate with all levels of the organization, and help the team stay close to the families we serve.
• Bring structure to how we work. Improve how product decisions get made, how teams communicate across functions, and how we plan, without adding process for its own sake. 
• Communicate product vision and strategy to internal & external stakeholders. Make priorities, assumptions, and decision rationale visible and understandable across the organization.

Who You Are

• You have 5–10 years of product & tech experience, including time owning the product function at an early stage small/mid-sized organization AND responsibility for aligning multiple functions around those goals (engineering, customer success, comms, etc).
• You're energized by taking something that already works and making it even better. You’re genuinely motivated by solving problems, big and small, for other people–not just the flashy wins.
• You’re a player-coach comfortable working on small teams, getting your hands dirty as the only product/tech person, and surfacing clarity out of ambiguity.
• You know how to create leverage through modern AI tooling, strong technical judgment, and processes that support organizational health. You’re familiar with AI-assisted product development and know how to use AI coding tools to vibecode & build prototypes. We retain an engineering agency, but we’re looking to increase our internal technical capacity to speed up the process between idea → deployment.
• You understand how to work with data–analytics experience is a plus. You know the right questions to ask and how to get from a number to a decision.
• You bring process maturity with a light touch. You know which structures a nine-person organization actually needs and which ones would just slow us down.
• You’ve got good design sense & a foundation in human-centered design principles including user research and insight-gathering skills (customer interviews, competitive analysis, segmentation).
• You have firsthand experience dealing with food insecurity and/or navigating social services, and/or experience working at a nonprofit or mission-driven organization. Nothing can replace the value of lived experience with the problem we’re solving.

Why Lemontree

• Compensation: $140k–$180k
• Flexible, Remote Work Environment
• Flexible scheduling within core business hours (Mon-Fri, 10am-4pm ET) and a culture that supports work-life balance.
• While positions are currently remote, you’ll be expected to travel 1-3 per year for conferences and other team gatherings.
• $300 annual equipment stipend
• Benefits & Time Off
• Generous employer-sponsored benefits including health, vision, and dental coverage and access to HSA and FSA.
• Access to a 401k for retirement savings, plus a 4% employer match.
• Unlimited time off, on top of 25-30 company holidays.
• Culture & Mission
• You’ll join a warm, collaborative team that puts our clients above everything else. Our culture is deeply human and humble, and we believe work should be a good place to be.

Our Interview Process (all conducted via Zoom)

1. Intro Call (30 minutes)
2. Technical Assignment + Interview (60 minutes)
3. Deep-Dive Interview (80 minutes)
4. Reference Check
5. Closing Call (30 minutes)

Lemontree is an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will get fair consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, creed, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, citizenship status, or veteran status.

We're committed to building a team that reflects the communities we serve, and we strongly encourage applications from people with lived experience of food insecurity. Further, we know that women and people of color are often less likely to apply to a position if they don’t match 100% of the job qualifications. Don’t let that be the reason you miss out on this opportunity! We encourage you to apply if you can demonstrate many of these skills and competencies.

As a tech nonprofit, we love innovation, and AI can be a great assistant–but you are the main event in this interview process. While we recognize AI as a valuable tool and encourage thoughtful use, over-reliance on it will not reflect your unique strengths. We encourage candidates to ensure their work reflects their own experiences and approach. We’re excited to learn more about YOU!