Principal Product Manager

Principal Product Manager Cooley is seeking a Principal Product Manager (Private Companies) to join the Innovation team.

Position summary:

As a leading technology law firm, Cooley is determined to become a leader in the digital practice of law. The Principal Product Manager, Private Companies ("Principal Product Manager") is a senior, self-directed individual contributor who owns the product line for accelerating and augmenting private company financings across company-side and investor-side workflows. This role turns complex legal and operational processes into software-enabled products that are designed, shipped, adopted, measured, and continuously improved, including AI-enabled capabilities where they create practical value.

The Principal Product Manager serves as the primary bridge between practice-group leadership, product, and engineering, ensuring that subject-matter expertise, business objectives, and product execution remain aligned throughout the product lifecycle. Operating with a high degree of autonomy, the Principal Product Manager sets product direction, makes roadmap tradeoffs, and drives delivery with a dedicated product squad, allocated engineering resources, dedicated budget, and executive sponsorship.

This role partners with software engineering by translating business goals into clear requirements, constraints, success measures, and long-term product needs; software engineering owns final technical design and implementation approach. This role will focus on practical outcomes, including deals conducted on-platform, time saved, data generated, quality improved, adoption achieved, and insights delivered.

• Product roadmaps:
  Collaborate with Private Companies practice group leaders to identify and roadmap capabilities that maximize time-to-value, reduce manual effort, and improve quality, with explicit outcome targets (e.g., cycle time, adoption, error rate).
• Collaborate with senior Innovation Team leaders to ensure that Private Companies-facing products leverage shared platform components and create reusable capabilities where appropriate.
• Make and communicate clear tradeoffs: what ships now, what is sequenced next, and what will not be pursued (and why).
• Run structured discovery (interviews, workflow observation, data review) to validate problems, quantify opportunity size, and define MVP scope.
• Produce clear, reviewable product artifacts that enable predictable delivery, including PRDs/MVP briefs, acceptance criteria, and release notes appropriate to scope.
• Define measurable success criteria for each increment, including baseline metrics, target outcomes, and post-launch evaluation method.
• Ensure target-state workflows and operating rules, including roles, states, exceptions, and handoffs, are documented, comprehensive, and correct.
• Ensure requirements are “shippable”: unambiguous scope, explicit non-goals, dependencies identified, and QA/validation approach defined.

• Define, measure, and maintain KPIs for each product and major workflow.
• Ensure instrumentation is built into workflows by design.
• Deliver dashboards and reporting that surface bottlenecks, trends, and improvement opportunities.
• Track KPIs before and after rollout and proactively adjust roadmap and rollout strategies to maximize measured impact.

• Develop and execute go-to-market strategies for launches, pilots, and scaled adoption.
• Drive adoption through enablement, training, and working agreements with stakeholders.
• Establish standards for workflow definitions, business processes, and reusable product capabilities.
• Use outcome data and executive sponsorship to resolve disputes and standardize where needed.
• Run regular operating reviews with leadership covering outcomes, adoption, investment tradeoffs, reuse, and roadmap priorities.

• Drive delivery from MVP through scale: define the release plan, sequence increments, and maintain execution cadence with the cross-functional squad and stakeholders.
• Pilot with real teams: launch controlled trials, measure outcomes, iterate rapidly, and operationalize what works into repeatable playbooks.
• Partner with Practice…