[Hiring] Senior Product Manager - AI Product @USA TODAY Co.

Role Description

USA TODAY Co. uses AI build-out across our newsrooms and product surfaces with journalistic standards, and this role sits at the center of that work. You will turn real newsroom workflows into working AI products like rapidly working prototyping, pressure testing what’s real, and then partnering with core product teams to ship and scale what works.

You’ll join a small, hands-on AI product group embedded in the enterprise, working directly with reporters, editors, and internal stakeholders to uncover high value problems, design and test AI-powered solutions, and generate the evidence needed for investment decisions. Once ideas show product market fit sign, you’ll own the handoff: translating prototypes into crisp specs and collaborating with engineering and editorial to launch, iterate, and maintain them in production.

This is a builder operator role. You move quickly from idea to working demo, and you bring rigor to what sticks — defining success, measuring impact, and killing what doesn’t deliver.

What You’ll Do

• Discovery & Prototyping
  • Build lightweight, end-to-end AI prototypes using our approved stack (Copilot Studio, Power Automate, OpenAI API, Perplexity API, n8n, Gemini Code Assist) to validate concepts before committing engineering time.
  • Embed with newsroom and internal teams to observe real workflows, identify painful bottlenecks, and separate high-leverage problems from nice-to-haves.
  • Run fast, lightweight user research from hallway tests to structured sessions — to put prototypes in front of reporters and editors and synthesize clear, actionable insights.
  • Identify early product-market fit signals (adoption, repeat usage, time saved, quality uplift), then make the explicit call to double-down, pivot, or shut ideas down.
  • Bring deep empathy for newsroom teams and a sharp editorial sensibility to AI-powered internal tools that make our journalism more efficient to produce and more impactful when it reaches readers.
• Core Product Collaboration
  • Act as the AI subject-matter partner to core product and engineering teams, translating validated experiments into clear, prioritized, implementation-ready specs.
  • Co-lead discovery with engineering to refine problem statements, clarify edge cases, and align technical tradeoffs, especially around model selection, latency, and safety.
  • Capture user insights, prototype behavior, and evaluation results in well-structured discovery tickets that engineering can execute without ambiguity.
• Portfolio Ownership & Operations
  • Own a slice of USA Today’s AI product portfolio, managing smaller enhancements and maintenance work across live tools used in newsrooms and internal operations.
  • Triage issues from users, instrumentation, and support channels; quickly identify root causes and drive resolution with the right product, engineering, or platform teams.
  • Monitor live AI features for quality, safety, and friction signals (e.g., hallucinations, latency, poor completion rates), and proactively propose fixes or experiments.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in product management, including at least 2 years directly building or shipping AI/ML or GenAI-powered products.
• Demonstrated ability to build functional AI prototypes yourself (e.g., workflows, bots, internal tools); you don’t need to be an engineer, but you can show working systems you created.
• Hands-on experience with at least some of: Copilot Studio, Power Automate, OpenAI API, n8n, or comparable enterprise AI / low-code platforms.
• Strong user research instincts. You can quickly design scrappy studies, get real signals from busy users, and turn it into concrete product decisions.
• Excellent spec-writing and communication skills: you can turn ambiguous, qualitative prototype learnings into sharp requirements, clear scopes, and success metrics.
• Proven ability to navigate large, matrixed organizations and build trust with both technical teams and editorial leaders.
• High comfort with ambiguity and change; you’re energized by defining the roadmap as much as executing it, and you’re willing to shut down your own ideas when the data says so.

Bonus Points

• Experience in media, news, or other content-heavy environments where deadlines, trust, and accuracy matter.
• Familiarity with newsroom workflows and reporter/editor pain points, from story discovery through production, packaging, and distribution.
• Experience designing or contributing to AI evaluation and governance frameworks (e.g., quality, safety, bias, and performance metrics).
• Working knowledge of prompt design, RAG architectures, and AI-assisted content workflows at a practical, hands-on level.

Benefits

• The annualized base salary for this role will range between $120,000 and $125,000.
• Base compensation is reflective of many factors, including, but not limited to, the market in which one lives/works, individual education level, skills, certifications and experience.
• Note: variable compensation is not reflected in these figures and based on the role, may be applicable.