Director of Product

Residency

All applicants must currently reside in the United States

Ask Sage(Big Bear company) is seeking a strategic, hands‑on Director of Product to guide product strategy, drive the backend and front‑end development process, and lead a Product & Engineering team in which developers, designers, and product owners are direct reports. Today the team comprises a five‑person backend engineering team and a three‑person front‑end engineering team, alongside design and product ownership, with three to four additional hires anticipated.

The Director will work in parallel with a Research & Innovation Lead (to be named). The current backend engineering lead is expected to move into that role as a peer to the Director while retaining some backend development oversight in a senior technical product owner capacity. The two roles work together: the Research & Innovation Lead informs product vision and brings validated research forward, and the Director is accountable for the product, its roadmap, and its delivery.

The Director will shape the integrated strategy and proposed roadmap for the entire Ask Sage platform and ecosystem: secure generative AI delivered through multi‑tenant SaaS, dedicated cloud, on‑premises, appliance, edge, air‑gapped, and mobile experiences, spanning chat and analysis, retrieval‑augmented generation, data ingestion, APIs, governed agents and automation, applications, enterprise administration, and model access. This leader will combine product vision with disciplined execution, translating customer missions, user needs, market evidence, business priorities, and technical opportunities into clear product outcomes.

The Director will provide evidence‑based roadmap recommendations and work closely with the EVP to make informed investment, sequencing, and tradeoff decisions.

• Develop and communicate a cohesive product vision and strategy for the complete Ask Sage platform.
• Shape product vision together with the Research & Innovation Lead (to be named), incorporating research and innovation direction into strategy and roadmap recommendations.
• Translate customer missions, user needs, company strategy, market dynamics, technical opportunities, security requirements, and business objectives into clear product direction.
• Advise the EVP on roadmap priorities, investments, sequencing, dependencies, and tradeoffs.
• Identify opportunities to build reusable capabilities that serve multiple customer segments, use cases, and deployment environments.
• Guide product lifecycle recommendations involving continued investment, modernization, consolidation, or retirement.

• Establish repeatable product‑discovery and validation practices that test customer problems, user needs, opportunities, and risks before significant development commitments are made.
• Engage government, national‑security, commercial, and internal stakeholders to understand mission needs, operating environments, and user workflows.
• Use interviews, observation, product analytics, adoption data, experimentation, market research, competitive insight, and business performance to guide recommendations.
• Distinguish scalable platform opportunities from customer‑specific implementation or professional‑services requirements.
• Serve as the platform’s senior Product Owner, maintaining a coherent connection among strategy, outcomes, roadmap initiatives, user stories, and acceptance criteria.
• Maintain a visible, understandable, ordered, and execution‑ready backlog.

• Own the end‑to‑end development process across the backend and front‑end teams — intake, refinement, planning, execution, review, and release — and continuously improve its…