Research Product Manager

Role Description

We are seeking an intellectually curious, highly analytical Research Product Manager to lead research and product definition for emerging AP Intelligence capabilities. This is a 0→1 individual contributor role. Much of the work begins before there is a roadmap—and sometimes before the precise product problem is fully understood.

• Turn broad questions into structured hypotheses, research plans, and experiments.
• Investigate using data, customer conversations, and lightweight prototypes.
• Translate findings into clear product decisions and requirements.
• Help discover problems, define products, and establish frameworks for engineering teams.
• Significant ownership and visibility with potential for expanded scope based on business needs.

What You’ll Do

• Research, Prototype & Evaluate:
  • Lead research into ambiguous product questions across event intelligence, structured news data, knowledge graphs, real-time information, and AI systems.
  • Turn questions into hypotheses, experiments, and evaluation frameworks.
  • Work hands-on with AP datasets and product outputs using tools such as SQL, Python, notebooks, LLMs, and lightweight prototypes.
  • Design benchmarks and evaluation methods for accuracy, timeliness, confidence, relevance, and usefulness.
  • Identify patterns that can become scalable schemas, taxonomies, scoring systems, and product capabilities.
• Define Products & Influence the Roadmap:
  • Translate research into clear product concepts, requirements, and recommendations for engineering teams.
  • Define useful AP Intelligence capabilities such as event importance, impact, velocity, provenance, and confidence.
  • Partner with engineering and applied AI teams to identify failure modes and improve product quality.
  • Use evidence to recommend which ideas should advance, change, or stop.
• Learn With Customers & Lead Across Disciplines:
  • Work directly with prospective customers and design partners to understand workflows and test emerging concepts.
  • Assess technical feasibility and customer integration of capabilities.
  • Partner closely with journalists, engineers, AI teams, commercial teams, and senior leaders.
  • Synthesize perspectives into clear decisions and communicate complex ideas to diverse audiences.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of relevant professional experience, including significant experience in product management, data products, AI/ML products, applied research, or highly analytical product environments.
• Strong track record of turning ambiguous problems into structured questions, experiments, and product recommendations.
• Exceptional analytical and conceptual thinking with the ability to find patterns in complex information.
• Strong technical and data fluency; comfortable exploring datasets and building lightweight analyses or prototypes.
• Familiarity with structured or semi-structured data, APIs, taxonomies, ontologies, knowledge graphs, and related information systems.
• Working knowledge of modern AI systems and concepts, including LLMs, RAG, embeddings, and model evaluation.
• Strong product and customer judgment.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.

Requirements

• Experience with AI/ML products, knowledge graphs, search/retrieval, real-time or event-driven data, intelligence platforms, or early-stage environments is especially relevant, but not required.

Benefits

• Comprehensive benefits including medical, dental, and vision coverage.
• Retirement benefits and company-paid life insurance.
• Paid vacation and sick days, paid parental leave, and mental well-being resources.

Company Description

The Associated Press is an independent global news organization dedicated to factual reporting. Founded in 1846, AP today remains the most trusted source of fast, accurate, unbiased news in all formats.