Technical Product Lead, GenAI Products
IA Collaborative· startup· Design· Sep 21, 2026 · 1mo ago
Chicago, IL
Hybrid
Full-time
Lead/Staff
$169K–$227K est.
Job description
IA Collaborative is seeking a technically rigorous, client-centered Technical Product Lead to steward our managed GenAI products after launch.
This strategic role combines product leadership, client partnership, and hands-on technical judgment. You will ensure our active AI products remain valuable, reliable, secure, and ready to evolve while advancing operational excellence across our product portfolio. You will establish repeatable delivery processes, build automations, and improve production visibility to keep our managed products reliable, secure, and ready to evolve.
You'll establish disciplined product-support processes, manage active products, and advocate for ongoing product health in our fast-paced, innovation-driven environment. A critical part of the role involves being a bridge between client needs and our development partners—monitoring and prioritizing product needs, translating them into clear technical work, and maintaining accountability through release and resolution.
You'll collaborate closely with Product, Design, Development, Program Management, and Technology teams to streamline workflows, strengthen product health, and enable reliable product delivery. The ideal candidate combines technical product and client leadership with strong engineering and platform fluency to ask the right questions, evaluate tradeoffs, improve delivery practices, and help teams resolve production issues.
Approximately 50% of this role will be billable work supporting managed products and client relationships, with the remaining time focused on internal initiatives and business development.
As a Technical Product Lead, GenAI Products, you will:
• Steward IA's managed GenAI products after launch, owning the ongoing lifecycle, client experience, and sustained product health.
• Establish and manage clear product-support intake, triage, prioritization, escalation, and communication processes; partner with Product, Design, and Development teams to translate client feedback, production issues, and technical debt into actionable work and ensure follow-through.
• Own release readiness from a product perspective, coordinating acceptance criteria, testing, dependencies, rollout plans, change communication, and post-release validation with internal and external development partners.
• Define and monitor practical product-health measures across adoption, usage, reliability, latency, support patterns, incidents, client feedback, and API or model costs; turn signals into prioritized improvements.
• Partner with Development and Engineering teams to establish consistent practices across development, staging, and production, including building automated build, test, and deployment workflows and defining approaches to version control, configuration management, rollback planning, and release documentation.
• Partner with Development and Engineering teams to improve logging, monitoring, alerting, and runbooks; coordinate incident response with clear client communication, technical escalation, documented resolution, and follow-through on root causes and preventive actions.
• Champion secure product operations by incorporating access controls, secrets and API-key hygiene, authentication, data-handling requirements, vulnerability remediation, and client deployment standards into roadmap and release decisions.
• Recognize when a client request is a support need, a product enhancement, a reliability or platform investment, or a new paid workstream; help transition qualified expansion opportunities to the teams responsible for scoping and building them.
• Advance IA's GenAI product strategy by building or helping improve shared tools, reusable backend capabilities, evaluation approaches, and engineering practices that make solutions more scalable and effective for teams and clients.
• Operate as a point of connection across product, design, development, operations, security, compliance, and testing; clarify ownership and maintain effective change-management and product-operating mechanisms.
Required Qualifications
• Bachelor's or advanced degree in Product Management, Computer Science, Information Technology, Design, Business, or a related field and at least four years in technical product management, product operations, client-facing technology delivery, applied engineering, customer success for digital products, or a related role.
• Demonstrated experience managing a live B2B, SaaS, digital, or AI-enabled product after launch, including its backlog, release lifecycle, product health, and client or user support.
• Experience translating product needs and production signals into technically actionable requirements, acceptance criteria, priorities, and tradeoff decisions for software engineering teams.
• Hands-on experience automating software build, test, and deployment workflows, with working knowledge of Git, APIs and integrations, cloud environments, and containers; ability to use logs, monitoring, and incident data to diagnose issues and improve reliability.
• Strong client relationship and communication skills, with an understanding of human-centered design and the ability to translate between client and engineering perspectives, present recommendations, facilitate decisions, and align technical priorities with user needs and business goals.
• Familiarity with generative AI product patterns, including LLM applications, RAG, agentic workflows, evaluation, model limitations, data considerations, cost and performance tradeoffs, and responsible AI practices.
• A security-minded approach to product delivery, with practical familiarity with identity and access, secrets management, data handling, vulnerability remediation, and secure deployment expectations.
• Experience building or improving internal software tools, developer-enablement capabilities, technical playbooks, or product-operating processes.
• Ability to work from our Chicago office and onsite with clients or in the field, per our IA Collaborative Work Model policy.
Preferred Qualifications
• Experience supporting managed AI products, SaaS platforms, or enterprise software in a consulting, design, innovation, startup, or product-development environment.
• Experience supporting business development through technical scoping, estimation, and contributing technical expertise to client pitches.
• Experience creating proofs of concept and strategic roadmaps for AI implementation and guiding solutions from prototype through production operation.
• Hands-on familiarity with front-end development using JavaScript, HTML, and CSS and back-end development using JavaScript or Python, databases, APIs, and Docker.
• Familiarity with Azure, AWS, or GCP and with web-platform fundamentals such as DNS, SSL/TLS, domains, hosting, authentication, and environment configuration.
• Experience with infrastructure as code, GitHub Actions or comparable CI/CD tooling, Postgres, application-performance monitoring, centralized logging, or cloud cost-management tools.
• Experience with LLMOps or MLOps practices, including prompt or model versioning, evaluation pipelines, quality monitoring, guardrails, and production feedback loops.
• Experience coordinating external engineering or technology partners and maintaining clear technical ownership across organizational boundaries.
• A strong perspective on AI implementation, interaction design, and the operational practices required to sustain trustworthy AI experiences.
Why IA Collaborative
At IA, you'll practice your craft in a whole new context. You'll be a part of designing the future of human experience as you transform your client's business, empower communities, and create a positive and lasting impact on the world.
IA's comprehensive benefits package includes medical, dental, and vision coverage; retirement savings benefits; profit-sharing programs; a suite of family benefits including paid time off for the birth of a child, medical leave, caregiver leave, wellness check-in days, flexible spending accounts for dependent care, health expenses and childcare, and 529 college savings planning and contributions; flexible work arrangements; and employer-paid life insurance and disability coverage.
IA Collaborative Work Model
IA Collaborative uses a hybrid work model, with Chicagoland-area team members working from our downtown headquarters three days per week (Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday), with occasional additional in-office days as needed.
Both onsite and in-field work are required for all team members. We are typically in the field once or twice a month for two to three consecutive days, conducting research or meeting with clients.
Work Authorization
IA Collaborative will sponsor applicants for employment visas.
About IA Collaborative
IA Collaborative is a global design and innovation consultancy focused on leading the forefront of behavioral insight, applied AI, and business innovation. We partner with the world's most ambitious organizations to realize new growth, accelerate cultures of innovation, and create breakthrough products, platforms, and experiences. Our teams lead from insight to action—designing experiences that enhance lives, building collaborative intelligence that reinvents how we work, and launching offerings that impact the future of human experience.
IA is on the national and global stage speaking about the business value of design. Featured by Fast Company as one of the country's preeminent design thinkers and nominated by the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum as a "Design Visionary," IA's leadership and work have been profiled by prominent business publications and have received multiple design accolades, including Best Design North America and Best UX Design in Fast Company's Innovation by Design Awards; the SXSW Business Design Award; and multiple honors in the Red Dot International, International Design Excellence Awards (IDSA), the GOOD DESIGN Awards, and the iF World Design Awards. IA Collaborative works with the world's most successful brands, including FedEx, Allstate, Airbnb, Fidelity, Apple, Johnson & Johnson, Nike, Lilly, and Audi.
At IA Collaborative, we are proud to be an equal opportunity workplace. We believe that welcoming a diverse variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and skills to our organization contributes to a thriving culture, a vibrant community, and breakthrough work. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristics protected by federal, state, or local law.
For more information about IA Collaborative, visit iacollaborative.com, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Glassdoor.
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