Product Manager

Duties and Responsibilities:

Build and maintain business relationships 

• Develop strong working relationships with business unit stakeholders — understand their goals, workflows, and pain points well enough to represent them accurately to engineering 

• Serve as a responsive, reliable point of contact for your stakeholders; triage incoming requests and manage expectations clearly 

• Partner closely with the Director of Product to ensure alignment on priorities and communicate the full picture back to the business 

Run structured discovery and requirements 

• Lead discovery for assigned initiatives: ask the right questions, separate what stakeholders ask for from what they actually need, define the problem before proposing a solution, and break the ask into phases that deliver value quickly and allow for iteration 

• Own the spec library for your portfolio: write and maintain clear, AI-ready requirements that Solution Architects and engineering teams can work from directly 

• Use AI to accelerate the requirements process — generating first drafts, synthesizing input from multiple stakeholders, and maintaining living documentation as products evolve 

• Use AI to build mockups and prototypes that make the proposed solution tangible — pressure-testing ideas with stakeholders before engineering invests in the build 

• Define acceptance criteria and ensure solutions meet business intent before and after release 

Drive delivery and adoption 

• Partner with Solution Architects through the delivery cycle; stay close enough to the build to catch misalignment early 

• Own release communication to your business unit; ensure stakeholders know what’s coming, when, and how to use it 

• Track adoption metrics post-launch; understand whether what shipped is driving value and surface that information clearly 

• Identify and escalate blockers; keep delivery moving without creating pressure that compromises quality 

Prioritize and communicate tradeoffs 

• Maintain a clear, prioritized backlog for your portfolio; make visible what’s in, what’s out, and why 

• Communicate prioritization decisions to stakeholders transparently — including the ones that will disappoint someone 

• Protect the engineering team from scope creep while keeping stakeholders bought in to the plan 

Work AI-first 

• Use AI tools actively in your daily work — requirements drafting, research, stakeholder synthesis, backlog management 

• Continuously look for ways AI can make you a better, faster product manager 

• Stay current on AI tooling relevant to your domain; bring ideas proactively rather than waiting to be asked 

Desired Credentials:

Required 

• 2–4 years of product management experience in a business-facing, stakeholder-intensive environment 

• Demonstrated use of AI in your product work — at minimum, writing specs or requirements with AI assistance; we expect this to already be part of how you work, not something you’re planning to start 

• Proven ability to build trusted relationships with non-technical stakeholders and translate their needs into clear product requirements 

• Strong written communication skills; able to write requirements and documentation that engineers and AI agents can work from without interpretation 

• Comfortable with ambiguity — able to start with a vague problem and produce a structured, prioritized plan 

• Chicago-based; able to be in the office a minimum of 3 days per week 

Strongly preferred 

• Experience working in complex multi-stakeholder environments 

• Experience contributing to a spec-driven or AI-assisted delivery model 

• Exposure to agile or iterative delivery processes — and the judgment to know when to follow the process and when to adapt it 

Not required 

• People management experience — this is an individual contributor role 

• Aviation or MRO domain experience — curiosity and the ability to learn a new domain quickly matters far more than knowing ours already 

 

WHO THRIVES IN THIS ROLE 

This role is a great fit for someone who is energized by being genuinely useful to the people they work with — someone who takes pride in understanding a business problem deeply before proposing a solution, and who sees clear writing as a superpower, not a chore. You are already using AI to do your job better, not because you were told to, but because you found it worked. You want to be in an environment that is moving fast and building something new, and you are comfortable being one of the people who helps figure out how it should work.