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AI Product Manager: New York
Financial services companies in New York (JPMorgan, Bloomberg, Moody's, and large law firms) have AI features that have been in pilot for 18 months or more. Engineering built the prototype. Compliance reviewed it. Leadership approved it in principle. The feature still is not in production.
The reason is consistent: nobody defined what production-ready means. What accuracy threshold does the model need to hit? What latency is acceptable at p95? What audit log does the feature need to satisfy SEC or FINRA review? What happens when the model gives a wrong answer, who sees it and what is the override path?
A fractional AI PM owns those answers. Fixed engagement: 8–12 weeks, defined deliverables.
Tell us about the AI pilot that isn't shipping.
The sequence is always the same. A team at a financial services firm builds an AI prototype, a document summarizer, a risk flag classifier, a contract extraction tool. It works in demo. An executive sees it and says "let's ship it." Then it sits.
Engineering says it's ready. Compliance has questions about what data the model processes. Legal wants to know what happens when the model is wrong and who is liable. The product team doesn't have anyone who can answer these questions in writing. The pilot stays in pilot.
The missing function is product management. Not project management, product management. Someone who can define accuracy thresholds, write a model card, specify the audit log schema, and produce the stakeholder sign-off plan that compliance and legal need to say yes.
New York's regulated industries (financial services, media, legal, healthcare, real estate) have the resources to build AI features. What they lack is the product layer that turns a working prototype into a production system.
Four specific blockers that keep pilots from shipping. Each one requires a product decision, not an engineering decision.
A written document specifying the accuracy threshold, latency requirement, failure mode handling, and human override path. This is what compliance and legal need to approve the feature. Without it, every conversation with them restarts from scratch.
A stakeholder map identifying who must approve the feature before it ships, what each person needs to see, and in what order approvals should happen. At firms like Moody's, getting the wrong stakeholders in the wrong order adds four to six weeks.
A model card documenting training data, known failure modes, and intended use. An audit log spec defining what every model call must record. These two documents answer 80% of compliance questions before the meeting happens.
A written go-live checklist with a pass/fail criterion for each item, and a rollback plan specifying exactly how to disable the feature at the model layer, the API layer, and the UI layer independently.
Every engagement ends with the same set of deliverables. These are documents your team can work from the day after the engagement closes.
Accuracy threshold with test set specification, latency requirement, audit log schema, model card, failure mode handling, and rollback plan. One document that answers compliance questions.
Who approves the feature, what each person needs to see, and the order of approvals. Includes the communication materials each stakeholder receives.
Pass/fail criteria for every production readiness item. The checklist is the go-live decision, when every row is green, the feature ships.
What the production monitoring dashboard tracks, what alert thresholds trigger human review, and how accuracy drift gets detected before it becomes a user-facing problem.
Discovery call (1 hour)
We map the current state of the pilot: what it does, where it is in the approval process, which stakeholders have been involved, and what the specific blockers are. We quote a fixed price at the end of this call.
Production readiness sprint (weeks 1–4)
We interview engineering, compliance, and legal. We write the production readiness document, model card, and audit log spec. We circulate to stakeholders and run the first round of reviews.
Stakeholder alignment and go-live (weeks 5–12)
We manage the approval sequence, answer compliance questions in writing, and own the go-live checklist. The engagement ends when the feature is in production or when every item on the checklist has a documented resolution.
Tell us what the feature does, where it is in the approval process, and what the current blocker is. We'll reply within one business day.