Director of Product Development

Director or VP of Product, AI Platform

• Location: Fully remote within the United States with occasional travel to SF.
• Client: Confidential - Private Equity Firm

Overview

Our client is reimagining how a leading private equity firm operates in an AI-native era.

A small, high-caliber engineering team has begun building the firm’s core AI platform. The Director / VP of Product will define what that platform is for: where AI can create disproportionate leverage, which problems are worth solving, and how the firm’s distinct judgment, workflows, and operating model should shape what gets built.

This is a senior, hands-on product leadership role for someone who thrives in ambiguity and creates things that do not yet exist. You will work closely with investment professionals, operating teams, functional leaders, and engineers to turn complex, often competing needs into a clear and evidence-based product direction.

The mandate is enablement, not centralization. This role will help remove friction and increase capability across the firm without creating an AI gatekeeping function. You will not run the engineering team’s process or simply convert requests into tickets. You will own the platform’s value thesis, prioritization logic, and evolving product direction.

Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain a living, ranked set of AI product hypotheses, including expected value, user needs, assumptions, supporting evidence, risks, and the criteria that would validate or disprove each bet.
• Identify where AI can create outsized leverage across investment, deal, portfolio, operating, and internal business workflows, with a focus on differentiated and reusable capabilities rather than incremental point solutions.
• Partner directly with senior stakeholders across the firm to understand how work is actually done, where friction exists, and where technology can materially improve decision-making, speed, quality, consistency, or scale.
• Prototype and pressure-test concepts using modern AI-native tools, such as Claude, Claude Code, Claude Cowork, Claude Design, or equivalent tools, before asking engineering to commit resources.
• Use prototypes, workflow analysis, user feedback, and direct observation to test assumptions quickly, advance strong opportunities, and kill weak or disproven ideas rather than allowing them to accumulate in a backlog.
• Partner closely with a small, high-leverage engineering team to provide product context, shape outcomes, evaluate tradeoffs, and determine when to push on a solution versus when to let engineering lead implementation.
• Challenge generic or off-the-shelf AI solutions when they do not fit the firm’s actual workflows, decision-making patterns, or differentiated judgment.

Requirements

• Significant product leadership experience at the Director, VP, Head of Product, or comparable level in Private Equity or adjacent industries.
• Demonstrated success building products, platforms, internal tools, workflow systems, or new capabilities in ambiguous, early-stage, or otherwise undefined environments.
• Strong product judgment grounded in user behavior, workflow design, adoption, and business value rather than feature volume, delivery process, or system design alone.
• Experience working with senior stakeholders in complex, high-expectation environments with competing priorities and limited tolerance for unnecessary process.
• Ability to identify the underlying need behind a stakeholder request, challenge assumptions constructively, and translate broad needs into a stronger product direction.
• Technical fluency sufficient to collaborate credibly with engineers, evaluate practical tradeoffs, understand modern AI capabilities and limitations, and prototype ideas independently.
• Hands-on familiarity with generative AI tools and AI-assisted prototyping or development workflows, such as Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Claude Code, Replit, Lovable, Figma AI, or similar tools.
• Strong communication, facilitation, and relationship-management skills, including the ability to build trust with senior leaders, hold productive conversations amid disagreement, and drive alignment without relying on hierarchy.
• Comfortable operating without a complete specification, formal roadmap, established product organization, or clearly defined playbook.
• A low-ego, high-ownership mindset with the ability to move between strategic direction and hands-on experimentation.