Product Lead - Chicago, IL

Human Agency

About The Position

We’re hiring a Product Lead to join our team and embed directly inside one of our client organizations — a leader in design-build. This role is for a hands-on product builder who thrives on embedding with teams, understanding their workflows, and delivering AI-powered software that drives real value. This is not a “strategy-only” role. You’ll spend your time with users, engineers, and executives alike — uncovering needs, setting priorities, and getting solutions shipped. You’ll bring modern product practices into a complex, real-world industry, while raising the bar for excellence in how software gets built.

Requirements

8+ years of product management experience, ideally building tools for complex workflows or mission-critical environments.
Proven ability to balance discovery and delivery — finding the right problems and shipping solutions that stick.
Experience leading small engineering teams or pods with high accountability.
Consulting mindset: able to embed inside client organizations, guide practices, and earn trust quickly.
Excellent communicator who can flex for end users, engineers, and executives.
Comfortable working with APIs and data pipelines — able to shape requirements, validate inputs, and build against structured data.
Experience with modern data platforms, ideally Snowflake (or equivalent warehouses like BigQuery, Redshift).
Able to make smart build choices with AI — knowing when to call APIs, when to use custom GPTs, and how to combine them into solutions that actually work for teams.
Operates confidently in cloud environments, especially Microsoft Azure and AWS ecosystems.
Above all, be someone that people admire, because you’re having fun doing great work.

Nice To Haves

Familiarity with enterprise integrations (e.g. Tableau) to connect insights into user workflows.

Responsibilities

Embed with client teams to observe workflows, run discovery, and translate insights into actionable software requirements.
Develop and apply structured prioritization methods (balancing user value, business outcomes, and technical feasibility) to guide trade-offs.
Keep teams focused on the highest-leverage opportunities, not just the loudest requests.
Scope projects with realistic estimates and clear milestones that deliver value early and often.
Know how to ship a prototype, gain feedback, iterate to value, and release production-grade solutions.
Lead small pods of engineers and operators to ship high-quality, on-time solutions.
Facilitate leadership updates and reporting, ensuring execs are aligned and confident in progress.
Above all, be able to roll up your sleeves to solve the problem in a way that advances us and the organization.
Work directly with APIs, data pipelines, and AI models to shape and validate solutions.
Partner with engineers to design and ship AI-driven tools that fit seamlessly into existing workflows.
Establish best practices for evaluating tools — weighing accuracy, usability, and long-term fit.
Stay current on AI capabilities and help translate them into practical applications inside the client’s environment.
Raise the bar for product craft, from clear scopes to clean communication and transparent evaluations that anyone can quickly understand.
Codify lessons into playbooks so the client builds lasting product capability.
Build a culture of excellence: sharing wins, measuring outcomes, celebrating progress, and owning areas of improvement.