Senior Product Manager

About the company:

Wadhwani Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Wadhwani AI) is an independent nonprofit research institute focused on AI for social good. Founded by US-based tech-billionaires Romesh Wadhwani and Sunil Wadhwani, both of whom are IIT and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) alumni.

What's on offer:

This is a unique opportunity to work at a first of its kind, global institute that is building AI solutions for the 4 million bottom of the pyramid population. You will be responsible for shaping the future of the health, agriculture, financial inclusion, and infrastructure sectors at a massive scale. A highly competitive salary (upto 50 LPA) based on your experience and competencies. You will join a talented and diverse team consisting of world-renowned scientists, innovators, and entrepreneurs from Microsoft, Stanford, Yale, Cornell, and IITs. We also have research collaborations with CMU, New York University, University of Southern California, and the University of Washington.

About the Role:

As a Product Manager, you own the product vision, strategy and execution. In other words, you are responsible for shaping and shipping the right product to our customers.

This will include understanding customers' challenges and their context, identifying specific problems to solve, finding useful data, defining use-cases and solution requirements, helping prototype and pilot solutions, and ultimately finding pathways to scale.

In doing so, you will work closely with external partners/customers such as government agencies, nonprofits, and corporates. Internally, you will work with cross-functional teams spanning research, engineering, product & program management, and partnerships.

Job Responsibilities:

1. Lay down the Vision, Strategy and Roadmap for Products:

• Create compelling vision for a solution (of which, product might only be a subset) that will deliver value and delight customers
• Choose specific problems to address, considering availability of relevant data and other factors that affect feasibility and define value proposition for customers
• Understand the complexities of a particular problem and build and design a human-centered product around it
• Study, interpret, synthesize and translate what the data reads and what the users say into product alterations and prioritize accordingly
• Work with team to translate user needs to product features
• Drive trade-offs and ensure progress

2. Running Product Pilots and Building for Scalability

• Identify pilot sites and obtain necessary permissions and agreements
• Design pilots, with special attention to success criteria and observations/data to be gathered
• Conduct field tests and pilot deployments for usability and performance
• Chalk out potential paths to scale, and identify and engage partners for scaling
• Quantify scale of impact possible if the problems were addressed

3. Stakeholder Management:

• Clearly communicate the long-term vision to the cross functional teams
• Build rich contextual understanding of customers' challenges, and articulate that to the team
• Ensure external and internal stakeholder buy-in for the proposed solution, through various inevitable changes

Must Haves:

• 7-10 years of experience in product management
• Experience as product manager building successful consumer software products, apps, or web apps
• Experience owning the vision of a product, and building a product from scratch
• Experience working with Agile / Scrum frameworks for developing software products
• Good verbal and written communication skills

Preferred:

• Experience serving government and nonprofit customers
• Domain knowledge in public health, agriculture, public infrastructure, or financial inclusion
• Practical exposure to building products based on machine learning and data science

Culture fit:

• Strong analytical skills and solution oriented thinking.
• Well articulated and structured communication skills.
• A strong team player who nurtures their juniors and provides learning experience to their leadership.
• Passionate about the social sector and impact for development.