Head of Product & Dev

Zinda Law Group, PLLC•Austin, TX

12d•Onsite

About The Position

The Head of Product & Dev will own the full lifecycle of product development at Zlayt AI, ensuring that features are clearly defined, properly scoped, and delivered with consistency, speed, and quality. This role requires a structured, engineering-minded operator who can translate business and legal workflows into actionable requirements, lead a development team, and create clarity across a fast-moving organization. You will work closely with Executive Leadership, Developers, Intake, QA, and legal experts to build a predictable product delivery engine, strengthen cross-functional alignment, and ensure releases meet the highest standards for performance and usability. This is a hands-on leadership role ideal for someone with a background in product development, technical program management, or engineering operations who excels at designing systems, coordinating complex workflows, and driving technical execution end-to-end.

Requirements

7+ years of experience in product development, technical program management, engineering operations, systems engineering, or similar cross-functional technical roles.
Demonstrated ability to lead development teams, manage technical schedules, and deliver complex products on time.
Strong background in requirements definition, documentation, testing, validation, and lifecycle management.
Experience driving structured processes across multiple functions (engineering, QA, ops, leadership).
Exceptional clarity in communication, documentation, and cross-functional coordination.
Technical fluency and the ability to evaluate trade-offs, clarify constraints, and guide implementation decisions.
Proven success improving processes, establishing standards, and creating predictable delivery systems.

Nice To Haves

Experience with automation, AI-driven products, workflow software, or document-generation platforms.
Background supporting legal operations, professional services, or similarly complex, regulated workflows.
Familiarity with Agile or hybrid engineering processes (scrum, kanban, stage-gate, or NPI-style frameworks).
Prior responsibility for release management, validation testing, or quality assurance processes.
Experience transitioning from hardware/system engineering into software product leadership (highly relevant to the candidates you shared).

Responsibilities

Product Planning & Roadmap Ownership
Build and manage the product roadmap in alignment with leadership priorities and operational needs.
Translate workflows, pain points, and business requirements into clear product specifications and acceptance criteria.
Define success metrics, release plans, and versioning structures for each product cycle.
Maintain documentation standards to support clarity, accountability, and repeatability.
Development Execution & Delivery
Lead daily and weekly development cadences, including sprint planning, backlog management, task scoping, and release reviews.
Ensure development cycles run on schedule, with transparent communication of progress, risks, and dependencies.
Unblock developers, resolve cross-team issues, and maintain predictable delivery timelines.
Oversee structured testing and validation processes to ensure high-quality, stable releases.
Systems Building & Process Design
Establish and enforce product development workflows, documentation standards, and change-control practices.
Implement tools, templates, and operational systems to streamline communication between product, dev, intake, QA, and leadership.
Improve efficiency by identifying bottlenecks, eliminating ambiguity, and standardizing product lifecycle processes.
Build mechanisms for capturing feedback and converting insights into continuous product improvements.
Technical Leadership & Cross-Functional Alignment
Provide high-level technical guidance to developers; ensure alignment between requirements and implementation.
Collaborate with legal subject-matter experts to understand case workflows and convert them into usable product features.
Partner with Intake, Operations, and QA to ensure that workflows, training, and release processes are integrated seamlessly.
Maintain clear lines of communication with leadership regarding roadmap, resourcing, risks, and delivery expectations.
Quality, Testing & Release Management
Oversee structured testing methodologies similar to engineering validation processes.
Ensure each release meets performance, accuracy, and usability standards before deployment.
Maintain audit-ready documentation of release notes, validations, and issue resolution.
Build and enforce processes for regression testing, version control, and post-release monitoring.