Head of Product

The Company Iris Labs, Inc. is a privately held, early-stage company pioneering the use of artificial intelligence to transform how people navigate life’s challenges and wellbeing. We are creating a platform that empowers people to build a life they are proud of and fulfilled by. We bring together psychology, product, design, engineering, and machine learning to build digital experiences that are engaging, trustworthy, and genuinely helpful.

Iris Labs is backed by Flagship Pioneering, an innovation enterprise that conceives, creates, resources, and builds companies that invent breakthrough technologies that transform the world. Flagship has created over 100 groundbreaking companies since 2000, including Moderna.

The Role Iris Labs seeks a Head of Product to lead the next stage of Iris Chat, our AI thought partner for psychological fitness. Through ongoing conversation, Iris helps people understand themselves, navigate relationships, and act on what matters to them. The successful candidate will own product strategy and execution, sharpen who we serve and why we matter, and turn promising user experiences into lasting value and a durable consumer business.

This is a hands‑on executive role for someone with exceptional product judgment, strong consumer instincts, and the technical depth to lead across product, engineering, and AI research. You must be comfortable having engineering and AI research report to you, directly or through their leaders, with responsibility for hiring, development, priorities, and results. You should be as comfortable reviewing a difficult conversation or a retention cohort as setting strategy and building a team.

Working closely with company leadership, scientists, engineers, and researchers, you will shape both Iris Chat and the organization that builds it. Success will mean a focused roadmap, measurable improvements in activation and retention, a more useful experience across conversations, and a strong team that consistently turns research and user insight into reliable product improvements.

Key Responsibilities

Define Iris Chat’s product vision, target users, most valuable use cases, differentiation, and roadmap. Translate long‑term ambition into clear priorities, making disciplined decisions about what to build, sequence, and stop.

Own the customer journey from onboarding and the first useful conversation through ongoing use and subscription. Set a high bar for conversational quality, memory, personalization, and thoughtful follow‑up that helps users make progress over time.

Drive measurable improvements in activation, cohort retention, conversion, and subscription value. Identify what makes users return, why they choose to pay, and what causes them to leave. Partner with growth on positioning, pricing, and acquisition economics, and with engineering on cost to serve.

Lead product discovery through user interviews, appropriate conversation review, behavioral data, and support feedback. Turn insights into clear product decisions and well‑designed experiments, and personally review important flows, prototypes, and AI behavior.

Build and lead a strong team across product, design, engineering, and AI research as the organization evolves. Hire and develop leaders, set clear decision rights, align staffing and budgets with priorities, and hold teams accountable for quality and delivery while giving experts room to do their best work.

Translate user needs into research questions and promising research into shipped capabilities. Balance near‑term improvements with longer‑term exploration, making explicit tradeoffs across model quality, reliability, latency, and cost.

Establish a shared approach to AI evaluation, experimentation, and release decisions. Connect human feedback, research findings, and production evidence to clear measures of product quality and meaningful user benefit.

Make privacy, user control, safety, and reliability part of the product experience. Design for sensitive moments and support user agency while maintaining clear boundaries around Iris’s capabilities.

Build a fast operating cadence with clear owners, focused priorities, and a short cycle from learning to shipping. Communicate product strategy, decisions, progress, and evidence clearly to company leadership, the board, and the broader organization.

Qualifications

A demonstrated record of building and scaling consumer products from early promise to sustained adoption, with measurable improvements in retention, user value, and business performance. Experience with consumer subscriptions, messaging, or other products built around repeat use is especially relevant.

Strong product judgment and taste, including the ability to identify important user problems, create simple and compelling experiences, and make sound decisions with incomplete information. Attention to language and interaction design is essential.

Experience leading teams and developing strong leaders, with the credibility and technical fluency to manage engineering and AI research directly. Ability to assess talent, coach technical leaders, resolve competing priorities, and hold teams accountable. Prior responsibility for engineering or research organizations is especially valuable.

Practical experience shipping AI products and a strong understanding of probabilistic behavior, evaluation, memory, personalization, and model limitations. Ability to question technical assumptions, distinguish a promising demonstration from a dependable product, and judge when further research is warranted.

Analytical depth across funnels, cohort retention, experimentation, pricing, and unit economics. Ability to combine quantitative evidence with user research, distinguish causation from correlation, and change direction when the evidence calls for it.

Executive ownership combined with a willingness to do the work: write a brief, inspect the data, challenge a prototype, manage resources, and unblock a launch. Ability to move between long‑term strategy and detailed execution.

Excellent written communication, presentation, and collaboration skills. Ability to build productive relationships across design, engineering, research, growth, operations, and company leadership, and explain complex tradeoffs clearly.

Self‑motivated and comfortable working in an ambiguous, fast‑moving environment with evolving goals. Ability to think independently, make difficult prioritization decisions, and create focus without unnecessary process. Experience in an early‑stage company is especially valuable.

A strong interest in psychology, behavior change, and helping people act with greater agency. Sound judgment in products people trust with sensitive information, and a clear understanding of the difference between meaningful user benefit and engagement that does not serve the user. Experience in wellbeing, coaching, or other high‑trust consumer products is a plus.

About Flagship Flagship Pioneering is a bioplatform innovation company that invents and builds platform companies, each with the potential for multiple products that transform human health or sustainability. Since its launch in 2000, Flagship has originated and fostered more than 100 scientific ventures, resulting in more than $90 billion in aggregate value. Many of the companies Flagship has founded have addressed humanity’s most urgent challenges: vaccinating billions of people against COVID-19, curing intractable diseases, improving human health, preempting illness, and feeding the world by improving the resiliency and sustainability of agriculture. Flagship has been recognized twice on FORTUNE’s “Change the World” list, an annual ranking of companies that have made a positive social and environmental impact through activities that are part of their core business strategies, and has been twice named to Fast Company’s annual list of the World’s Most Innovative Companies. Learn more about Flagship at

Flagship Pioneering and our ecosystem companies are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status.

At Flagship, we recognize there is no perfect candidate. If you have some of the experience listed above but not all, please apply anyway. Experience comes in many forms, skills are transferable, and passion goes a long way. We are dedicated to building diverse and inclusive teams and look forward to learning more about your unique background.

The salary range for this role is $213,000 - $280,500. Compensation for the role will depend on a number of factors, including a candidate’s qualifications, skills, competencies, and experience. Iris Labs, Inc. currently offers healthcare coverage, annual incentive program, retirement benefits and a broad range of other benefits. Compensation and benefits information is based on Iris Labs, Inc.’s good faith estimate as of the date of publication and may be modified in the future.

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