Product Manager/Agile Master, AI and Digital Products

Charles River Associates • Chicago, TX

9d • Hybrid

About The Position

Charles River Associates is seeking a Product Manager / Agile Master to help accelerate the development and adoption of AI-enabled tools and digital capabilities across CRA’s practice areas. This person will work directly with senior domain experts and technical teams to convert high-value business problems into well-defined product requirements, prioritized backlogs, agile delivery plans, and measurable outcomes. The ideal candidate is a senior product-minded agile operator who can move comfortably between business strategy, consulting workflows, AI-enabled product development, and disciplined execution. This is not a pure project management role and not a pure technical product role. CRA needs someone who can sit with economists, life sciences consultants, energy experts, litigation professionals, corporate functions, and technical builders; understand what they are trying to accomplish; facilitate user story mapping; translate ambiguous needs into clear requirements; and run a structured agile process across multiple teams. The role will be especially important as CRA builds repeatable internal and client-facing AI capabilities, coordinates AI initiatives across practices, and ensures that promising ideas do not remain trapped within individual teams or one-off prototypes. CRA’s AI environment requires a strong balance between innovation, confidentiality, quality control, regulatory sensitivity, and responsible use of AI. Core Mission The Product Manager / Agile Master will create the operating discipline needed to move CRA’s AI and digital initiatives from ideas and prototypes into governed, usable, scalable products. This person will help CRA identify the right use cases, define what success looks like, align stakeholders, manage agile execution, and ensure that practice experts and technical teams are working from a shared roadmap.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Software Engineering, Engineering, Product Management or related discipline, advanced degree welcomed.
• 5-8+ years of experience in product management, agile delivery, scrum leadership, business analysis, digital transformation, AI product operations, or technology-enabled consulting.
• Demonstrated experience translating ambiguous business needs into structured requirements, user stories, acceptance criteria, roadmaps, release plans, and delivery plans.
• Hands-on experience running agile ceremonies and managing cross-functional product backlogs in Jira, Azure DevOps, or comparable tools.
• Experience working directly with senior stakeholders, subject matter experts, software engineers, data scientists, IT/security teams, and legal/risk stakeholders.
• Ability to communicate effectively across both technical and non-technical audiences, including senior executives, consultants, product teams, and engineering teams.
• Strong documentation discipline and ability to create concise artifacts that clarify decisions, scope, risks, dependencies, and next steps.
• Proven ability to remove blockers, manage dependencies, drive accountability, and keep teams aligned without relying solely on formal authority.
• Strong judgment in environments where confidentiality, quality control, client impact, and responsible use of technology matter.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with AI-enabled products, generative AI, knowledge management tools, internal copilots, RAG applications, analytics platforms, workflow automation, or enterprise data products.
• Experience in consulting or professional services, especially environments where senior experts own client relationships and delivery standards.
• Experience supporting product development in regulated, confidential, or high-stakes contexts such as litigation, life sciences, healthcare, financial services, energy, economics, or legal services.
• Experience with tools such as Jira, Azure DevOps, Confluence, Aha!, Productboard, Miro, Mural, Monday.com, Smartsheet, Microsoft Planner, Teams, SharePoint, or similar platforms.
• Scrum Master certification, Product Owner certification, SAFe certification, or equivalent practical agile experience.
• Familiarity with responsible AI principles, model validation, AI risk management, data governance, information security, and enterprise AI adoption.
• Comfort working with technical product concepts such as APIs, cloud platforms, data pipelines, LLM routing, authentication, usage tracking, and software release lifecycles.

Responsibilities

• Work with domain experts across CRA’s practice areas to identify, structure, and prioritize AI and digital product opportunities.
• Facilitate discovery sessions, user interviews, stakeholder workshops, and user story mapping sessions with consultants, corporate staff, data experts, and engineering teams.
• Translate complex consulting workflows into clear product requirements, user personas, user journeys, epics, user stories, acceptance criteria, and success metrics.
• Develop business cases for proposed AI and digital initiatives, including expected user value, business impact, required resources, adoption considerations, risks, dependencies, and sequencing.
• Help distinguish between ideas that should become enterprise products, practice-specific tools, reusable accelerators, vendor-enabled solutions, or one-off project assets.
• Create and maintain product roadmaps, prioritized backlogs, release plans, sprint plans, decision logs, and delivery artifacts that technical teams can execute against.
• Clarify scope, minimum viable product definitions, release criteria, dependencies, decision rights, and definitions of done.
• Convert ambiguous stakeholder needs into actionable work while preserving the business context and analytical standards that matter to CRA’s practices.
• Balance near-term delivery needs with longer-term platform strategy, reuse, governance, maintainability, and enterprise adoption.
• Define measurable outcomes and product health indicators such as adoption, usage, quality, cycle time, stakeholder satisfaction, and business impact.
• Run agile delivery processes across cross-functional teams, including sprint planning, backlog refinement, daily standups, sprint reviews, retrospectives, release planning, and cross-team dependency management.
• Maintain delivery visibility through burn-down or burn-up reporting, RAID logs, dependency maps, release dashboards, and concise executive-ready status updates.
• Ensure teams have clear priorities, well-formed stories, acceptance criteria, aligned sprint goals, and a shared understanding of tradeoffs.
• Remove blockers by coordinating across practice stakeholders, engineering, data science, IT, security, legal, risk, vendor, and leadership groups.
• Adapt agile practices to CRA’s consulting environment, where work may include internal R&D, client-facing delivery, practice-led prototypes, enterprise infrastructure, and rapidly evolving AI capabilities.
• Serve as the connective tissue between senior stakeholders, practice experts, technical teams, and corporate functions.
• Facilitate structured decisions when stakeholders have competing priorities, unclear ownership, unresolved risks, or differing definitions of success.
• Help establish governance routines for intake, prioritization, delivery readiness, launch readiness, adoption, and continuous improvement of AI and digital products.
• Support responsible AI, confidentiality, model validation, data governance, regulatory sensitivity, and quality control requirements throughout the product lifecycle.
• Ensure that product documentation, meeting artifacts, action items, and delivery commitments are crisp, traceable, and easy for busy teams to act on.
• Plan demos, pilot programs, beta feedback loops, launch communications, training materials, adoption support, and post-release reviews.
• Collect feedback from consultants and corporate users and translate it into prioritized enhancements, usability improvements, and process changes.
• Track delivery metrics and product outcomes, then use those insights to improve team performance, product quality, and stakeholder confidence.
• Continuously refine agile processes, product artifacts, and team rituals so they remain lightweight, useful, and appropriate for CRA’s culture.
• Help build a repeatable operating model for taking AI and digital ideas from intake through discovery, delivery, release, adoption, and measurable impact.

Benefits

• CRA’s robust skills development programs, include formal and informal programs, encouraging you to thrive as an individual and team member.
• Training incorporates technical training, presentation skills, internal seminars, and career mentoring and performance coaching from an assigned senior colleague.
• Additional leadership and collaboration opportunities exist through internal firm development activities.
• Comprehensive total rewards program including a superior benefits package.
• Wellness programming to support physical, mental, emotional and financial well-being.
• In-house immigration support for foreign nationals and international business travelers.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance.
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.
• Life and disability insurance.
• Paid time off (vacation, sick leave, holidays).
• Paid parental leave.
• Wellness programs and employee assistance resources.
• Commuter benefits.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior