Product Owner - Advanced Analytics & Research

Be Here. Be Great. Working for a leader in the insurance industry means opportunity for you. Great American Insurance Group's member companies are subsidiaries of American Financial Group. We combine a "small company" culture where your ideas will be heard with "big company" expertise to help you succeed. With over 30 specialty and property and casualty operations, there are always opportunities here to learn and grow.

At Great American, we value and recognize the benefits derived when people with different backgrounds and experiences work together to achieve business results. Our goal is to create a workplace where all employees feel included, empowered, and enabled to perform at their best.

P&C IT Services provides professional services to help our business units and corporate functions use technology to create, manage, and optimize information and business processes. IT Services can include a wide range of activities such as: software development, data management, Cloud services, IT security, network security, technical support, establishing and overseeing access rights, procuring and maintaining equipment or software, managing the infrastructure, and defining security procedures, The overall goal of IT Services is to provide technology solutions that increase efficiency, reduce costs, and give our company a competitive advantage over our competitors.

Great American's culture is built on connection, shared learning, and strong relationships. To support this, employees in this role are expected to be on-site a minimum of two days a week if local to Cincinnati, with the potential to work three days remotely. Core in-office days are Tuesday and Thursday but will be determined by business needs.


As the insurance industry undergoes digital transformation, the AI Innovation Lab serves as Great American's proving ground for emerging AI capabilities. Team members evaluate, prototype, and validate AI technologies against real business needs, determining what's ready for enterprise adoption and what isn't. This is applied research with a purpose: every initiative ties directly to business requests, and successful proofs-of-concept are handed off to IT delivery teams for production implementation.


What Makes This Role Unique

• This isn't a traditional research position, and it isn't a traditional development role. It's something in between-now with senior product ownership and change leadership:

• Vision-to-value ownership: You create and evolve the Lab's product vision and roadmap so work stays tightly aligned to enterprise priorities and measurable outcomes.

• Rapid experimentation: You'll go deep on a technology, guide the team to build working prototypes, determine fit-for-purpose, and move to the next challenge.

• Business-driven focus: Every project originates from a real business ask-supporting underwriters, actuaries, claims professionals, and analysts across the enterprise.

• Fail-fast culture: A well-documented "no, and here's why" is as valuable as a successful proof-of-concept.

• Partnership model to production: You work with Enterprise Architecture and IT delivery teams so innovations can be operationalized-not just demoed.

• Human-in-the-loop philosophy: Ethical, transparent, explainable AI is foundational in insurance; you ensure designs reflect that from day one.

Key Responsibilities


1) Vision Creation & Product Strategy

• Define and communicate the AI Innovation Lab product vision, outcomes, and success metrics; maintain a roadmap that balances innovation with enterprise readiness.

• Create decision frameworks for adopt / adapt / defer / reject outcomes so the Lab's learning directly informs enterprise AI strategy.

• Own prioritization of initiatives across multiple business requests based on value, feasibility, risk, and operational constraints.

2) Customer Engagement (Business Stakeholders) & Executive Communication

• Serve as the primary Lab-facing leader for business stakeholders and executives: intake, discovery, expectation-setting, and ongoing engagement.

• Translate ambiguous business asks into clear problem statements, hypotheses, and acceptance criteria for research and prototypes.

• Deliver clear, credible readouts-able to explain tradeoffs, risks, and readiness to both technical and non-technical audiences.

3) Product Design & Research Planning

• Drive product discovery: user journeys, workflow design, guardrails, human-in-the-loop controls, and measurable definitions of value.

• Partner with technical team members to ensure prototypes align with enterprise constraints and API-first integration principles.

• Ensure evaluation plans exist before building (quality measures, go/no-go criteria, and what "good" looks like).

4) Research Delivery & Transition to Production

• Oversee rapid prototypes and proofs-of-concept from concept through stakeholder validation; ensure learnings are documented (wins and failures).

• Coordinate with Enterprise Architecture and IT delivery teams to shape handoffs that can succeed in production (security, operations, integration, support model).

• Ensure the Lab produces "decision-grade" outputs: feasibility, limitations, risk, and a recommended path forward.

5) Full-Stack AI Lifecycle Ownership & Optimization

• Demonstrated understanding of the full AI product lifecycle: problem framing → data readiness → model/approach selection (ML vs GenAI) → prototyping → evaluation → governance/security → production transition → monitoring and continuous improvement.

• Drive optimization across performance, cost, and reliability: latency/throughput, retrieval quality (RAG), prompt/agent instruction tuning, and regression control as systems evolve.

• Champion MLOps/LLMOps practices: reproducibility, versioning (models/prompts), CI/CD patterns, monitoring, and controlled rollout strategies.

6) AI Agents & Customer-Facing AI Applications

• Demonstrated experience creating AI agents (single and multi-agent) that use tools/APIs to execute workflows with guardrails and human oversight appropriate for insurance.

• Experience building customer-facing AI applications (internal customers such as underwriting, claims, actuarial, and analytics teams), including conversational UX patterns, RAG grounding, structured outputs, and feedback loops that build user trust.

• Define and drive production readiness for agent solutions (failure modes/fallbacks, monitoring, operational handoff expectations) in partnership with Enterprise Architecture and delivery teams.

7) Team Management & People Leadership

• The Product Owner also leads the Data Science team, ensuring clear goals, effective prioritization, and highquality delivery. They are responsible for performance management, talent development, and supporting HRrelated activities that foster a healthy, collaborative team culture. This includes guiding career growth, facilitating feedback cycles, and aligning team capabilities with evolving business needs.

8) Change Leadership & Culture

• Act as a visible change leader-guiding adoption of AI-enabled workflows, building trust through transparency, and ensuring responsible use.

• Mentor team members and contribute to a culture of continuous learning and high-quality delivery.

Required Qualifications

• Proven senior leadership in product ownership/product management/innovation leadership delivering outcomes in ambiguous environments (especially where technology feasibility must be proven).

• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills-able to align executives, business stakeholders, and technical teams; strong storytelling with evidence.

• Strong understanding of enterprise integration principles, including API-first thinking and how AI capabilities transition into production systems.

• Strong understanding of AI/ML and GenAI solution patterns sufficient to lead discovery and evaluate approaches objectively (including ML evaluation fundamentals and LLM/RAG patterns).

• Demonstrated experience creating AI agents and customer-facing AI applications with appropriate guardrails and human-in-the-loop controls.

• Demonstrated understanding of MLOps/LLMOps, evaluation rigor, monitoring, and optimization across performance, cost, and reliability.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in insurance, financial services, or other regulated industries.

• Hands-on familiarity with agentic AI frameworks and orchestration patterns such as LangChain / LangGraph, CrewAI, or similar.

• Familiarity with enterprise AI interoperability patterns and standards such as Model Context Protocol (MCP), tool registries, and A2A (agent-to-agent) coordination concepts for enterprise workflows.

• Experience with Microsoft Azure cloud services.

• Background working with actuarial, underwriting, or claims processes and/or experience transitioning prototypes to production teams.

Business Unit:
Property & Casualty IT Services

Benefits:

We offer competitive benefits packages for full-time and part-time employees*. Full-time employees have access to medical, dental, and vision coverage, wellness plans, parental leave, adoption assistance, and tuition reimbursement. Full-time and eligible part-time employees also enjoy Paid Time Off and paid holidays, a 401(k) plan with company match, an employee stock purchase plan, and commuter benefits.

Compensation varies by role, level, and location and is influenced by skills, experience, and business needs. Your recruiter will provide details about benefits and specific compensation ranges during the hiring process. Learn more at

*Excludes seasonal employees and interns.