Senior Technical Product Manager

The American Journalism Project is seeking a Senior Technical Product Manager to oversee the development of AI-powered tools for nonprofit newsrooms. This role involves managing product strategy, user research, and ensuring the quality and effectiveness of AI outputs to support fundraising efforts in local journalism.

Responsibilities:

• Build, prioritize and improve the product throughout the development cycle
• Scope, prioritize, and ship product improvements in collaboration with contract engineering partners, including reviewing features prior to release
• Contribute hands-on technical work when it meaningfully accelerates delivery, such as prototyping workflows, refining prompt systems, or improving internal tooling
• Synthesize insights from evaluation, user feedback, and usage data to inform product priorities, working with the Technology Lead to sequence improvements and surface trade-offs
• Lead regular conversations with end users and other stakeholders to understand workflows, test features, and identify where the product creates (or fails to create) value
• Ensure AI output quality, reliability and performance
• Design and maintain evaluation frameworks for AI outputs, including reviewing model behavior, identifying drift or failure modes, and translating findings into concrete improvements
• Write test cases, refine prompts, run regressions, and set quality standards for accuracy, tone, and appropriateness in nonprofit fundraising contexts
• Monitor system health and product usage patterns to identify and mitigate risks and ensure reliable performance
• Drive adoption and translate insights for portfolio and field-wide learning
• Improve usability and onboarding, and build the documentation and enablement materials needed to support adoption across the portfolio
• Contribute to insights reports, briefings, and public presentations about the product, in collaboration with the Product & AI Studio team
• Some travel required – roughly 6-8 trips annually

Requirements:

• Demonstrated experience in product management roles, including overseeing an entire product development cycle from concept to launch
• Hands-on experience building, deploying, or meaningfully improving an AI-powered product, including using evaluation or feedback loops to improve quality over time
• Sufficient technical depth to evaluate engineering work, ask good architectural questions, and push back when needed – even when you are not the primary implementer
• Familiarity with modern web-based products and infrastructure concepts (e.g., APIs, integrations, version control, deployment workflows), and an ability to reason about systems, dependencies, and failure modes
• A nuanced understanding of responsible AI use – including data privacy, appropriate use boundaries, and thoughtful judgment about when automation should support (not replace) human decision-making
• Strong product judgment and the ability to operate with limited precedent, making informed trade-offs as goals and constraints evolve, and to communicate and collaborate with others to navigate decisions with uncertain outcomes
• Comfort working closely with engineers, designers, and non-technical nonprofit professionals (e.g. development directors, operations staff, or executives), translating between technical systems and real-world workflows
• An interest in nonprofit journalism, fundraising, or mission-driven technology, and a desire to learn from newsroom partners and collaborators. Experience in the field is a plus but not required
• Clear written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain complex ideas to non-technical audiences and synthesize feedback into actionable insights
• Experience in the field of nonprofit journalism, fundraising, or mission-driven technology