Expert Senior Manager, Product Management & Innovation

WHAT MAKES US A GREAT PLACE TO WORK

We are proud to be consistently recognized as one of the world’s best places to work. We are currently the #1 ranked consulting firm on Glassdoor’s Best Places to Work list and have maintained a spot in the top four on Glassdoor’s list since its founding in 2009.

Extraordinary teams are at the heart of our business strategy, but these don’t happen by chance. They require intentional focus on bringing together a broad set of backgrounds, cultures, experiences, perspectives, and skills in a supportive and inclusive work environment. We hire people with exceptional talent and create an environment in which every individual can thrive professionally and personally.

WHO YOU’LL WORK WITH

You’ll join our Product Management & Innovation experts within the AI, Insights & Solutions (AIS) team, which includes a group of experts in analytics, engineering, product management, user research, and design. Together, we create human-centric solutions that leverage the power of data and artificial intelligence to drive competitive advantage for our clients.

WHERE YOU’LL FIT WITHIN THE TEAM

As an Expert Senior Manager, Product Management & Innovation, you’ll work on integrated teams alongside our general consultants and clients to lead development of omnichannel solutions across a wide range of industries and problems —defining and evolving the strategic vision with cross-functional teams to deliver impactful, feasible, and client-aligned experiences, products and businesses, and advising on innovation and product strategy. You’ll advise on innovation and product strategy, and are expected to independently lead the work, including defining and owning the workplan, fostering cross-collaboration, managing direct and cross-functional reports, engaging with clients, and overseeing answer/product definition and delivery.

You have a passion for designing and developing customer-centric innovative solutions, a foundation in product development, technical aptitude, and a collaborative mindset. With a special focus on driving innovation, you will work closely with engineering, design, and strategy teams to explore emerging technologies, validate new ideas, and guide agile development, while managing senior and multiple stakeholders and preparing and running meetings with senior clients from research and planning to execution. You'll contribute to high-impact, client-facing solutions while building your technical and strategic skills in a fast-paced, experimentation & data-driven environment

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Lead Human-Centered Design Strategy and Product Innovation

Lead the integration of human-centered design into product strategy, aligning research with business and customer goals. Translate complex user insights, business needs, and technical feasibility into a clear product vision, roadmap, feature map, and development-ready backlog. Lead ideation, journey mapping, and service design workshops to align teams around user-centered solutions. Drive cross-functional collaboration to support prototyping and testing to ensure continuous validation. Drive high-impact, balanced decision-making by applying a strategic lens to balance user needs, reliable tech solutions, business needs, and alignment.

• Set Strategy and Lead the Delivery of Proof of Concepts (POCs) and Minimum Viable Products (MVPs), and Products

Lead multi-disciplinary teams and clients in tackling business challenges and developing innovative product solutions. Use agile, product/ CX best practices to guide execution and ensure outcomes. Quickly integrate into client environments, building trust and credibility through strategic guidance and strong cross-functional collaboration. Own work planning and execution, ensuring AIS delivers high-quality contributions that align with client goals. Shape actionable, insight-based strategies with measurable impact. Help drive client decisions by identifying and framing key tradeoffs to help teams move forward.

• Own Product Planning, Roadmaps, and Execution

Lead the development and evolution of product roadmaps, ensuring initiatives align with broader strategic goals. Effectively translate complex technical concepts into clear and non-technical language for all stakeholders. Leverage business and user insights to identify and evaluate potential product roadmap opportunities, articulating associated tradeoffs and mitigating risks throughout the product lifecycle. Prioritize effectively across multiple workstreams and build a development-ready backlog with user stories, mockups, architecture, and acceptance criteria.

• Inspire, Align, and Lead Cross-Functional Teams

Cultivate a high-performing, collaborative team culture across Bain, clients, and other stakeholders. Ensure alignment across stakeholders through transparency, shared ownership and momentum toward results. Be a visible, influential leader across the AIS team and the broader organization.

• Build Capabilities and Drive Thought Leadership

Mentor others and lead capability-building across AIS, Bain, and client teams, skill development in human-centered design, agile, technical fluency (e.g., how products are built and scaled), and innovation-driven product management. Maintain a curious and proactive mindset, adopting emerging tools and technologies, such as generative AI, to boost productivity and enhance team outcomes. Help build institutional knowledge within AIS and Bain communities, reinforcing AIS’s role as a center of product and innovation excellence.

• Travel expectation: 40–50%

ABOUT YOU

Required Qualifications

• Relevant Bachelor's degree
• A minimum of 10 years of experience in product management, with deep expertise in agile methodologies, design thinking, and software development practices.
• Expert knowledge in the four lenses (feasibility, viability, desirability, strategy) with the ability to manage any lens as needed  
• Expert in product managing software development, including hands-on experience in AI solutions 
• Expert in business case building to clearly identify, quantify and frame the potential value of the product/solution 
• Experience using Gen-AI powered product management and product development tools effectively (i.e., ProductBoard, Jira, Synthetic Users, VoiceOver, Loveable, etc.)
• Expert in design thinking principles and leading cross-functional teams through workshops to cultivate design thinking innovation process
• Ability to speak fluently to the technical aspects of the products worked on
• Ability to rapidly absorb and interpret technical information, with a deep understanding of modern design and development principles
• Deep experience in applying agile and scrum methodologies to lead and scale cross-functional teams
• Experience in Lean Startup principles to drive experimentation, validate ideas, and inform product strategy
• Strong interpersonal and communication skills, including the ability to explain and discuss approaches and technicalities of solutions with colleagues and clients from other disciplines
• Ability to work independently, manage priorities, and collaborate effectively in complex, ambiguous situations, passion for delivering high-impact client results in fast-paced, evolving environments
• Curiosity, proactivity and critical thinking
• Ability to collaborate with people at all levels and with multi-office/region teams, cross-functional/inter-disciplinary teams including engineers, designers and researchers
• Experience leading multiple projects independently and growing and developing more junior product managers

Preferred Qualifications

• Relevant Master’s degree in business or technology or related field
• Commercial acumen and understanding of business models
• Experience working in startups or other entrepreneurial environments 
• Top-tier consulting experience preferred
• Background in architecture/software dev/data pipelines
• Experience in product managing the architecting and implementing of AI/tech solutions at an enterprise scale
• Solid product management experience, with a history of managing ideation to launch of analytics or ML-driven software, solutions, or services
• Experience in product managing the building and deploying ML pipelines into production