Director - Consumer Growth & Market Expansion

Nelnet is a diversified and innovative company committed to enriching lives through the power of service. The Director, Growth & Market Expansion role is designed to lead growth efforts by exploring external market opportunities and assessing organizational readiness before investment.

Responsibilities:

• Engage with customers, partners, startups, and market ecosystems
• Identify unmet needs, emerging behaviors, and market gaps
• Translate insights into clear, testable venture hypotheses aligned with NDS Consumer’s business goals
• Build and operate a repeatable system to evaluate new opportunities
• Source and synthesize opportunities across markets and domains
• Define qualification criteria (strategic fit, differentiation, risk-to-ROI)
• Collaborate with Finance, Operations and IT to ensure resource alignment and execution readiness
• Evaluate product, operational, technical, and delivery readiness
• Identify and communicate gaps early
• Recommend whether to build, partner, pause, or discontinue initiatives
• Present opportunities and insights to executive leadership and influence decision making
• Lead regular opportunity reviews with clear outcomes (continue, pivot, terminate)
• Prevent sunk-cost bias and avoid sustaining low-value initiatives

Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree required
• 5+ years building and validating new businesses, products, or growth initiatives
• Proven ability to lead cross-functional work in ambiguous environments
• Hands-on experience with venture creation, pilots, and go-to-market execution
• Demonstrated success leading cross-functional work in ambiguous environments
• Founder or early-stage/startup experience
• Exposure to AI-enabled products or emerging technologies
• Strong customer-first mindset with direct validation experience
• Strategic generalist across product, finance, marketing, sales, and operations
• Sound judgment in capital allocation, risk management, and prioritization
• Ability to make decisive, sometimes unpopular, calls
• MBA, advanced degree, or equivalent entrepreneurial experience