Product Lead AI Solutions

As a Product Lead AI Solutions at Kearney, you will contribute to consulting project teams as they offer honest advice and practical guidance to our clients. Depending on each clients unique needs, projects can differ in length, size, and location, giving you unique, hands-on experiences across a range of industries and service practices.

About Kearney PERLab

Kearney PERLab (Product Excellence and Renewal Lab) is Kearneys global dedicated practice for everything product. We help clients make products that consumers fall in love with. Our design-driven approach to gross margin transformation offers end-to-end capabilities to support growth at every point in a products life cycle.

PERLab combines 100 years of Kearneys operational expertise with award-winning design and cutting-edge proprietary data tools to unlock tangible product gains. With experts across product design, product development, sustainability, user experience, industrial design, IoT, consumer insights, product engineering, packaging design, and manufacturing excellence, PERLabs end-to-end capabilities can support your growth at any point in your products life cycle.

PERLab has studios in Chicago, Stuttgart, Bengaluru, Hamburg, and Shanghai, with clients ranging from Fortune 500 companies to private equity portfolio firms.

We operate across three core capability areas:

• Insights & Strategy: Consumer intelligence, brand assessment, and portfolio optimization to drive profitable growth.
• Product Engineering & Design: Architecture, benchmarking, and component optimization from concept through production.
• Sustainability & Manufacturing Excellence: Cost-efficient manufacturing at scale with sustainability built in by design.

Our flagship technology platform, Velocity AI, is a PERLab accelerator powered by agentic AI — rebuilding product development as a smart, connected system. Velocity AI connects intelligent agents across the product life cycle, automating tasks, learning continuously, and enabling products to be delivered faster and at lower cost while ensuring sustainability and market relevance.

The Bengaluru engineering team builds and maintains the Velocity platform suite — powering PERLabs global consulting engagements with AI-driven intelligence.

Working alongside a dedicated and diverse set of people, you will broaden your knowledge and experience in an open, agile, and collaborative environment. With the freedom to be yourself and recognition for what you bring to the table, you can put your purpose into action and help build a future that works for everyone, everywhere—as a Kearney Original.

Responsibilities

1. Set product vision and portfolio priorities

- Shape the roadmap for AI-powered capabilities across product lifecycle use cases such as new product development, formulation, teardown and benchmarking, should costing, BOM optimization, supplier and raw material choices, and supply risk.

- Decide where productized capability makes sense versus where bespoke prototyping is the better path.

- Prioritize the highest-value opportunities across client demand, strategic differentiation, and technical feasibility.

2. Lead client-facing discovery and solution shaping

- Work directly with clients, partners, and domain experts to uncover needs, frame use cases, and define success criteria.

- Run demos and working sessions grounded in real data, product concepts, and live prototypes.

3. Guide rapid concept-to-prototype cycles

- Convert ambiguous business questions into briefs that engineers can execute quickly and intelligently.

- Maintain lean operating rhythms that preserve speed and clarity without unnecessary ceremony.

- Help the team make good trade-offs between speed, quality, product coherence, and client relevance.

4. Bring outside-in innovation to the platform

- Track industry shifts, competitor moves, emerging AI capabilities, and adjacent technologies that could reshape the offering.

- Identify where frontier tools, new deployment models, or unconventional product concepts can create differentiated client value.

- Continuously evolve the product thesis so the platform stays ahead of the market rather than reacting to it.

5. Bridge commercial, domain, and technical decisions

- Balance product vision, engineering effort, risk, and value creation in day-to-day decisions.

- Help shape product narratives, adoption plans, and decision support for Kearney leadership and client teams.

- Ensure the team stays anchored in practical impact rather than building technology in search of a problem.

Who you are:

After nearly 100 years, we know this business is fundamentally about making connections—between facts, figures, insights, strategies, tools, technologies, and above all, people. Thats why we look for collaborative, insightful, and inquisitive problem-solvers who dont accept the first thing in front of them and who are always unapologetically themselves.

We want to hear from you if you have the following:

• 7 – 12 Years of Experience
• Strong product management or product leadership experience in enterprise software, AI products, digital platforms, or consulting-led product environments.
• Credible understanding of physical-product industries such as manufacturing, consumer goods, industrial, medtech, automotive, or adjacent sectors.
• Excellent client communication and executive storytelling skills.
• Enough technical depth in AI, LLMs, data architectures, agents, and model limitations to shape solutions credibly with engineers.
• Ability to structure product experiments, define success metrics, and make prioritization decisions with incomplete information.
• Comfort using lightweight technical tools - for example Python, SQL, prompt tools, or simple prototyping environments - to validate ideas and sharpen product direction.
• Track record of taking ambiguous opportunities from concept to useful product outcomes.
• Client-Facing Mindset
• Communicate clearly with senior client stakeholders, domain experts, and non-technical audiences.
• Translate messy business problems into crisp technical or product decisions.
• Understand where AI can add value in real product and operations workflows rather than chasing novelty.

Personal Traits

• High agency and ownership: you move from ambiguity to action without waiting for perfect instructions.
• Speed with judgment: you move fast, but you know where rigor matters.
• Curiosity and range: you enjoy learning new tools, domains, and problem spaces.
• Low ego, high collaboration: you work well with partners, clients, and specialists across disciplines.
• Responsible use of AI: you care about security, reliability, and practical value, not just impressive demos.

Nice to Have

• Prior experience in consulting, transformation, or a highly client-facing product role.
• Background in product cost, sourcing, product engineering, manufacturing, or supply chain decision environments.
• Experience with commercial shaping, business cases, product packaging, or value proposition design for AI-enabled solutions.
• Technical background that enables productive conversations on architecture, trade-offs, and prototype feasibility.

What we can offer you:

Every day, our people work to be the difference for our clients, our communities, and our colleagues. Helping them make an impact, they are sustained by a competitive remuneration package plus comprehensive benefits and perks, including but not limited to:

̶ Generous retirement/pension savings contributions

̶ Comprehensive medical insurance for employees and their families

̶ Non-partner equity-based awards (for consulting managers and above)

̶ Structured and on-the-job learning and development opportunities

̶ Personalized opportunities including talent mobility, flexible work programs and externships to help you chart a unique career journey to pursue your own personal and professional goals

Read more about our benefits and how you can make your mark, your way at Kearney.com/careers.