Product Manager

Cooley AI•Washington, DC

12d•$150,000 - $200,000

About The Position

Cooley AI is seeking a Product Manager to join the Innovation team. Cooley AI is the wholly-owned subsidiary of Cooley LLP. The frontier development arm of the leading technology law firm in the world. Our mission is to bring the best-in-class practices from the technology field into the legal domain to help lead our firm and the legal industry into the AI era. All employees of Cooley AI are employees of Cooley and are seconded to Cooley AI. As a leading technology law firm, Cooley is determined to become a leader in the digital practice of law. The Product Manager (“PM”) is responsible for turning operational processes into products. They will own a portfolio of workflows, spanning firm administration, practice operations, or client delivery, with a mandate to transform them from manual, inconsistent, and opaque into instrumented, automated, and measurable, software-enabled processes. Process Cooley Technical Solution Project Managers touch are meant to become a product: designed, shipped, adopted, and continuously improved. This is a shipping role. They will be accountable for product delivery by a dedicated product squad with allocated engineering resources, dedicated budget, and executive sponsorship. They will also partner with software engineering on the how by influencing technical decisions through clear requirements, constraints, discussion, and long-term needs; software engineering owns final technical design and implementation approach. Success is defined by outcomes in production: time saved, quality improved, adoption achieved, insights delivered. Specific duties and responsibilities include, but are not limited to, the following:

Requirements

After orientation at Cooley LLP, exhibit proficiency in the Microsoft Office suite, iManage and other firm applications
Ability to work extended and/or weekend hours, as required
Ability to travel, as required
3+ years’ directly applicable experience (e.g., product management, shipping workflow, platform, or experience with automation products in production)
Experience productizing services or building playbook-driven operations
Demonstrated success building and shipping products from conception to release

Nice To Haves

Bachelor’s degree
Demonstrated record delivering measurable improvements in cycle time, quality, adoption, or efficiency, and using such KPIs to shape the product roadmap
Strong systems thinking and a track record of connecting people, process, and systems into scalable designs
Data fluency and the ability to define instrumentation, metrics, ontologies, and taxonomies
Strong technical skills, including comfort with APIs, integrations, and enterprise system constraints
Clear ability to make ROI-based tradeoffs and drive adoption in stakeholder-rich environments
Technical fluency (APIs, integrations, enterprise constraints); CS/engineering background a plus or equivalent hands-on experience.
Prior large law firm or large management consulting firm experience
Familiarity with our stack or adjacent technologies: FastAPI, .NET Core, Angular, LangGraph, Pydantic-AI, vector databases, or similar frameworks and technologies
Experience with workflow platforms, document automation, AI-assisted tooling, or process mining
Experience measuring platform economics (reuse, build-time reduction, cost-to-serve)
SQL proficiency or experience partnering closely with analytics teams
Self-directed learner who is curious about technology and how it works
Self-starter who can identify problems, form hypotheses, build a test plan, and execute.
The ability to adjust based on learnings and independently suggest pivots and refinements to existing strategies.
Enthusiasm for legal technology and the challenge of bringing modern product thinking to high-stakes, high-trust environments where precision matters
High emotional intelligence with the ability to build trust with senior stakeholders, navigate ambiguity with engineering leaders, and bring people along on difficult decisions.
A team player who can successfully and enthusiastically collaborate across various disciplines, functions, and levels of responsibility
Ability to think strategically and innovatively, possessing strong planning/analytical skills and problem-solving capabilities
Ability to work effectively in time-sensitive situations and under extreme pressure with meticulous attention to detail – including the ability to work on multiple initiatives simultaneously.
Strong verbal and written communication skills, including the ability to succinctly translate technical and complex details to a non-technical business audience.

Responsibilities

Create, maintain and own a roadmap that maximizes time-to-value, reduces manual effort, and improves quality, with explicit outcome targets (e.g., cycle time, adoption, error rate)
Prioritize opportunities using a consistent scoring model (impact, volume, reusability, risk, effort) grounded in data and stakeholder input
Make and communicate clear tradeoffs: what ships now, what is sequenced next, and what will not be pursued (and why)
Run structured discovery (interviews, workflow observation, data review) to validate problems, quantify opportunity size, and define MVP scope
Deliver and produce clear, reviewable product artifacts that enable predictable delivery: PRDs/MVP briefs, acceptance criteria, and release notes appropriate to scope
Define measurable success criteria for each increment, including baseline metrics, target outcomes, and post-launch evaluation method
Ensure target-state workflow and operating rules (roles, states, exceptions, handoffs), are documented, comprehensive, and correct
Ensure requirements are “shippable”: unambiguous scope, explicit non-goals, dependencies identified, and QA/validation approach defined
Define and measure KPI’s
Ensure instrumentation is built into workflows by design
Deliver dashboards and reporting that surface bottlenecks, trends, and improvement opportunities
Track KPIs pre and post-rollout and proactively adjust roadmap and rollout strategies to maximize measured impact
Develop and execute go-to-market strategy
Drive adoption through enablement, training, and working agreements with stakeholders
Establish standards for workflow definitions, data semantics, and component reuse
Use outcome data and executive sponsorship to resolve disputes and standardize where needed
Run regular operating reviews with leadership: outcomes, adoption, platform economics, roadmap tradeoffs
Run delivery from MVP through scale: define the release plan, sequence increments, and drive execution cadence with cross-functional squad and stakeholders
Pilot with real teams: launch controlled trials, measure outcomes, iterate rapidly, and operationalize what works into repeatable playbooks
Partner with Practice Innovation, a dedicated innovation function comprised of former practicing attorneys, to run pilots, measure outcomes, iterate rapidly, and scale what works
All other duties as assigned or required