Lead, Product Management & Innovation

Company Overview 

Bain & Company is a global consultancy that helps the world’s most ambitious change makers define the future.

Across 65 cities in 40 countries, we work alongside our clients as one team with a shared ambition to achieve extraordinary results, outperform the competition, and redefine industries. We complement our tailored, integrated expertise with a vibrant ecosystem of digital innovators to deliver better, faster, and more enduring outcomes. Our 10-year commitment to invest more than $1 billion in pro bono services brings our talent, expertise, and insight to organizations tackling today’s urgent challenges in education, racial equity, social justice, economic development, and the environment. We earned a platinum rating from EcoVadis, the leading platform for environmental, social, and ethical performance ratings for global supply chains, putting us in the top 1% of all companies. Since our founding in 1973, we have measured our success by the success of our clients, and we proudly maintain the highest level of client advocacy in the industry. 

You’ll join our Product Management & Innovation experts within the AI, Insights & Solutions (AIS)  team, which includes a group of experts in analytics, engineering, product management, user researchers and design. Together, we create human-centric solutions that leverage the power of data and artificial intelligence to drive competitive advantage for our clients.

Position Summary

As Lead, Product Management & Innovation, you’ll work on integrated teams alongside our general consultants and clients to lead development of omnichannel solutions across a wide range of industries and problems—guiding strategic vision, execution, and cross-functional teams to deliver impactful, feasible, and client-aligned experiences, products and businesses, while advising on innovation and product strategy.

You have a passion for designing and developing customer-centric innovative solutions, a foundation in product development, technical aptitude, and a collaborative mindset. With a special focus on driving innovation, you will work closely with engineering, design, and strategy teams to explore emerging technologies, validate new ideas, and guide agile development from research and planning to execution. You'll contribute to high-impact, client-facing solutions while building your technical and strategic skills in a fast-paced, experimentation & data-driven environment.

Essential Functions

Apply Human-Centered Design Principles to Drive User-Centric Innovation

Use deep expertise in human-centered design to uncover user needs and pain points through research. Align research insights with business and customer goals to shape the product vision. Lead and take part in ideation, journey mapping, and service design workshops to co-create with users and stakeholders. Collaborate on prototyping and testing to ensure continuous validation while applying a strategic lens to balance user needs, reliable tech solutions, business needs, and alignment.

Support the Delivery of Proof of Concepts (POCs) and Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) and Products that Drive Results

Partner closely with Bain teams and clients to understand business challenges and deliver on business needs, and drive results. Use your expertise to recommend and drive insights-based solutions that lead to measurable impact for users and the business. Lead insight generation across user, technical, and business dimensions. Lead the development of product requirements documents, user stories, and help with backlog prioritization by leveraging insight across user, technical, and business dimensions. Apply agile and product management best practices to manage delivery, optimize roadmaps, and run effective agile ceremonies. Foster effective alignment and collaboration across stakeholders while managing day-to-day work planning and delivery excellence.

Contribute to Product Planning, Roadmap Definition, and Execution

Use your product management expertise to guide decision-making and effectively translate complex technical concepts into clear and non-technical language for clients and cross-functional teams. Leverage business and user insights to help define, size, and prioritize product roadmap opportunities, articulating associated tradeoffs. Maintain a curious and proactive mindset, adopting emerging tools and technologies, such as generative AI, to boost productivity and enhance team outcomes.

Contribute to Building an Inspired Team

Play an active role in fostering a positive and collaborative case team culture across AIS, clients, and other stakeholders. Adapt quickly to client environments, building trust and influence through collaboration and consistent engagement.

Support Building Capabilities of AIS, Bain, and Client Teams

Continue building your skills in human-centered design, agile, technical fluency (e.g., how products are built and scaled), and innovation-driven product management. Contribute to internal initiatives and intellectual property in Product Management and Innovation. Capture and share learnings from client work to strengthen institutional knowledge within AIS and Bain communities.

Qualifications

• Education: Relevant Bachelor’s degree
• Experience: 3-5 years minimum experience

Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities

• Familiarity with the four lenses framework (feasibility, viability, desirability, strategy) with the ability to run feasibility lens 
• Familiarity with using insights to guide product decisions that consider business value, technical feasibility user needs and business goals, with the ability to assess and lead technical feasibility)
• Basic proficiency in product managing software development, with some exposure to AI solutions 
• Experience using Gen-AI powered product development tools effectively (i.e Synthetic Users, V0, Loveable, etc.)
• Experience and/or knowledge of design thinking principles and leading or facilitating workshops to cultivate design thinking innovation process
• Able to explain the technical aspects of the products worked on
• Ability to rapidly absorb and interpret technical information, with a basic understanding of modern design and development principles
• Awareness of agile project management methodology, incl. familiarity with Scrum
• Awareness of Lean Startup methodology 
• Strong interpersonal and communication skills, including the ability to explain and discuss approaches and technicalities of solutions with colleagues and clients from other disciplines
• Ability to work independently, manage priorities, and collaborate effectively in complex, ambiguous situations, passion for delivering high-impact client results in fast-paced, evolving environments
• Curiosity, proactivity and critical thinking
• Ability to collaborate with people at all levels and with multi-office/region teams, cross-functional/inter-disciplinary teams including engineers, designers and researchers

Preferred

• Experience working in startups or other entrepreneurial environments 
• Top-tier consulting experience preferred
• Background in architecture/software dev/data pipelines, a plus
• Experience supporting the architecture and implementation of AI/tech solutions at a smaller scale, a plus
• Product management process experience, including assisting in the development and launch of software, enterprise solutions, services, mobile/web apps or other products, a plus
• Foundational experience in building ML pipelines, a plus