Product Manager​/Agile Master, AI and Digital Products

Product Manager / Agile Master, AI and Digital Products

Charles River Associates is seeking a Product Manager / Agile Master to help accelerate the development and adoption of AI-enabled tools and digital capabilities across CRA's practice areas. This person will work directly with senior domain experts and technical teams to convert high-value business problems into well-defined product requirements, prioritized backlogs, agile delivery plans, and measurable outcomes.

The ideal candidate is a senior product-minded agile operator who can move comfortably between business strategy, consulting workflows, AI-enabled product development, and disciplined execution. This is not a pure project management role and not a pure technical product role. CRA needs someone who can sit with economists, life sciences consultants, energy experts, litigation professionals, corporate functions, and technical builders; understand what they are trying to accomplish;

facilitate user story mapping; translate ambiguous needs into clear requirements; and run a structured agile process across multiple teams.

The role will be especially important as CRA builds repeatable internal and client-facing AI capabilities, coordinates AI initiatives across practices, and ensures that promising ideas do not remain trapped within individual teams or one-off prototypes. CRA's AI environment requires a strong balance between innovation, confidentiality, quality control, regulatory sensitivity, and responsible use of AI.

The Product Manager / Agile Master will create the operating discipline needed to move CRA's AI and digital initiatives from ideas and prototypes into governed, usable, scalable products. This person will help CRA identify the right use cases, define what success looks like, align stakeholders, manage agile execution, and ensure that practice experts and technical teams are working from a shared roadmap.

Key Responsibilities

• Work with domain experts across CRA's practice areas to identify, structure, and prioritize AI and digital product opportunities;
• Facilitate discovery sessions, user interviews, stakeholder workshops, and user story mapping sessions with consultants, corporate staff, data experts, and engineering teams;
• Translate complex consulting workflows into clear product requirements, user personas, user journeys, epics, user stories, acceptance criteria, and success metrics;
• Develop business cases for proposed AI and digital initiatives, including expected user value, business impact, required resources, adoption considerations, risks, dependencies, and sequencing;
• Help distinguish between ideas that should become enterprise products, practice-specific tools, reusable accelerators, vendor-enabled solutions, or one-off project assets.

• Create and maintain product roadmaps, prioritized backlogs, release plans, sprint plans, decision logs, and delivery artifacts that technical teams can execute against;
• Clarify scope, minimum viable product definitions, release criteria, dependencies, decision rights, and definitions of done;
• Convert ambiguous stakeholder needs into actionable work while preserving the business context and analytical standards that matter to CRA's practices;
• Balance near-term delivery needs with longer-term platform strategy, reuse, governance, maintainability, and enterprise adoption;
• Define measurable outcomes and product health indicators such as adoption, usage, quality, cycle time, stakeholder satisfaction, and business impact.

• Run agile delivery processes across cross-functional teams, including sprint planning, backlog refinement, daily standups, sprint reviews, retrospectives, release planning, and cross-team dependency management;
• Maintain delivery visibility through burn-down or burn-up reporting, RAID logs, dependency maps, release dashboards, and concise executive-ready status updates;
• Ensure teams have clear priorities, well-formed stories, acceptance criteria, aligned sprint goals, and a shared understanding of tradeoffs;
• Remove blockers by coordinating across practice stakeholders, engineering, data science, IT, security, legal, risk, vendor, and leadership groups;
• Adapt agile practices to CRA's consulting environment, where work may include internal R&D, client-facing delivery, practice-led prototypes, enterprise infrastructure, and rapidly evolving AI capabilities.

• Serve as the connective tissue between senior stakeholders, practice experts, technical teams, and corporate functions;
• Facilitate structured decisions when stakeholders have competing priorities, unclear ownership, unresolved risks, or differing definitions of success;
• Help establish governance routines for intake, prioritization, delivery readiness, launch readiness, adoption, and continuous improvement of AI and digital products;
• Support responsible AI, confidentiality, model validation, data governance, regulatory sensitivity, and quality control requirements throughout the product lifecycle;
• Ensure that product documentation, meeting artifacts,…