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