Senior Product Manager - Contractor

McKinney•New York, NY

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

The Senior Product Manager at McKinney supports the strategic vision, development, delivery, and optimization of digital products and experiences—from concept to launch and beyond. This role bridges product strategy, user experience, design, technology, and business goals to ensure products deliver meaningful value for both users and clients. Comfortable in a fast-moving agency setting, you work seamlessly across disciplines to turn ideas into shipped experiences. You pair strong product judgment with structured execution, driving alignment from discovery through delivery while managing scope, budget, timelines, and outcomes. You are deeply customer-centric, grounded in design-thinking principles, and fluent in translating business ambition into product strategy and experience requirements. You bring a passion for emerging technologies, particularly AI, and actively stay current with cutting-edge tools, methods, and modern product practices. You are energized by innovation and understand how to responsibly harness AI-powered systems to create differentiated, future-forward experiences.

Requirements

Demonstrated experience working on or leading modern AI-powered products and intelligent systems.
Strong ability to translate business requirements into product strategy and structured experience definitions.
Deeply customer- and user-centric mindset, with fluency in design-thinking methodologies.
Experience engaging meaningfully with engineering teams on platform capabilities, integrations, and architectural considerations across cloud environments (e.g., AWS, Snowflake, auth0, MongoDB, etc.).
Foundational understanding of modern data pipelines, platform architecture, and data engineering workflows.
Experience leading cross-disciplinary teams in agile or hybrid workflows.
Strong discovery, prioritization, and roadmap development skills.
Comfort leveraging AI-powered prototyping tools and emerging technologies to accelerate innovation.
Must be authorized to work in the US for any employer.
Not seeking sponsorship or assistance with obtaining work authorization.

Nice To Haves

Hands-on experience with lightweight AI engineering, scripting, or minimal-code prototyping to rapidly validate ideas.

Responsibilities

Define product vision, strategy, and measurable outcomes aligned to business goals.
Translate business requirements into clear product strategies and actionable experience frameworks.
Convert insights, research, and creative direction into structured product roadmaps and prioritized backlogs.
Identify opportunities to innovate across platforms, AI-enabled systems, and connected customer journeys.
Champion a customer-first mindset, ensuring user needs meaningfully inform strategic decisions.
Lead the end-to-end lifecycle: discovery, definition, prototyping, build, launch, and iteration.
Apply design-thinking methodologies and rapid application development principles to accelerate learning and reduce risk.
Partner with product stakeholders to shape product briefs, synthesizing research, customer insights, and business goals into actionable requirements, user stories, and acceptance criteria.
Collaborate with design and engineering to prioritize features, manage backlogs, and ensure technical feasibility.
Define scope, milestones, timelines, and resource needs in partnership with resourcing and discipline leads.
Ensure requirements are clear, documented, and aligned before development begins.
Identify dependencies, constraints, and risks early, proactively mitigating issues before they impact delivery.
Maintain roadmap and backlog alignment as priorities evolve, incorporating stakeholder feedback without derailing delivery.
Monitor burn, forecast needs, and ensure work remains within agreed parameters.
Lead change management processes, documenting and communicating scope adjustments clearly across teams and clients.
Facilitate sprint planning, standups, reviews, and retrospectives.
Serve as a connective layer between business strategy, product intent, and technical implementation and ensure alignment across product lifecycle.
Anticipate and mitigate risks before they impact delivery.
Ensure executive updates are delivered weekly and clearly.
Define KPIs and success metrics at the outset of projects.
Track performance against goals and recommend data-informed optimizations.
Conduct post-launch evaluations to inform future work.