Director of AI – Product Strategy

Exalans and Hunar; Bengaluru; On-site; INR 4,500,000 - 7,000,000; Full time

Job summary

Exalans and Hunar is seeking a visionary Director of AI – Product Strategy to define and drive AI-native strategy across our portfolio. This IC role sits at the intersection of product strategy, AI innovation, and organizational transformation.

You will set AI vision, governance, and implementation frameworks, partnering with Product Heads and the Chief Product Architect to enable scalable architectures and rapid AI adoption across products.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in product management, product strategy, or technology strategy roles.
• Proven track record defining and executing AI-native product strategies.
• Experience influencing across product teams, engineering, and exec stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Define and own the company-wide AI-native product strategy and governance framework.
• Develop and maintain an AI governance model with evaluation criteria and prioritization.
• Scan the market for emerging AI disruptions and translate into actionable guidance for product teams.
• Author and maintain the AI Product Playbook for best practices across the portfolio.
• Partner with Product Heads to identify AI-native opportunities and align roadmaps.
• Lead AI opportunity assessments to identify gaps and whitespace with business value.
• Create a portfolio-level AI roadmap view showing interdependencies and cross-product leverage.
• Run regular AI strategy reviews with product leadership to track adoption and adjust plans.
• Serve as strategic AI counterpart to the Chief Product Architect, grounding AI decisions in user outcomes.
• Co-develop scalable AI platform architecture to reduce time-to-market for AI features.

Skills

AI/ML fluency

Strategic thinking

Executive communication

Hands-on AI tools

Ambiguity tolerance

Job description

About the Role

We are looking for a visionary Director of AI – Product Strategy to define and drive our AI‑native product strategy across our entire product portfolio. This is a high‑impact, highly visible individual contributor role that sits at the intersection of product strategy, AI innovation, and organizational transformation.

You will serve as the AI strategy authority for all product lines — setting the vision, governance, and framework that empowers individual Product Heads to embed AI natively into their roadmaps. You will work shoulder‑to‑shoulder with our Chief Product Architect to build scalable, velocity‑enabling architectures and actively champion the adoption of AI tools to augment the productivity of every Product Manager in the organization.

This role is not about managing people — it is about managing ideas, influence, and impact at scale.

What You'll Do

• Define and own the company‑wide AI‑native product strategy, establishing a clear framework that guides how each product line integrates AI into its core value proposition.
• Develop and maintain an AI governance model — including principles, guardrails, evaluation criteria, and prioritization frameworks — that enables Product Heads to make confident, consistent AI adoption decisions.
• Continuously scan the market for emerging AI disruptions, synthesize their implications, and translate them into actionable strategic guidance for product teams before disruption hits.
• Author and maintain the AI Product Playbook, a living document of best practices, patterns, and standards for AI‑native feature development across the portfolio.
• Partner closely with each Product Head to help them identify and prioritize AI‑native opportunities within their domain, ensuring roadmaps reflect both near‑term adoption and long‑term differentiation.
• Lead AI opportunity assessments across product lines — identifying capability gaps, competitive threats, and whitespace where AI can create measurable user and business value.
• Establish a portfolio‑level AI roadmap view that surfaces interdependencies, shared capabilities, and opportunities for cross‑product leverage.
• Run regular AI strategy reviews with product leadership to evaluate roadmap alignment, track adoption progress, and course‑correct in real time.
• Serve as the strategic product counterpart to the Chief Product Architect, ensuring AI architecture decisions are grounded in product strategy, user outcomes, and development velocity goals.
• Co‑develop a scalable AI platform architecture that reduces time‑to‑market for AI features, promotes reuse of models and infrastructure, and reduces per‑product build complexity.
• Champion the adoption of shared AI services, APIs, and model layers across the portfolio to eliminate redundancy and increase delivery speed.
• Evaluate and recommend third‑party AI platforms, model providers, and tooling to accelerate product development without sacrificing strategic control.
• Lead the initiative to augment Product Manager productivity through the systematic adoption of AI tools — covering research synthesis, PRD generation, competitive analysis, user feedback analysis, sprint planning, and more.
• Identify, pilot, and scale AI tools and workflows that measurably reduce PM toil and redirect team energy toward higher‑order strategic thinking.
• Build a culture of AI‑first working habits within the product organization through enablement sessions, tool onboarding, templates, and shared repositories.
• Measure and report on PM productivity uplift as a key organizational metric tied to AI adoption.
• Serve as a trusted AI thought leader who can fluently engage C‑suite executives, both internally and with customers, on AI product vision, strategy, and competitive positioning.
• Lead customer discovery conversations focused on understanding AI‑driven pain points, emerging expectations, and opportunities — feeding insights directly into strategic guidance for product teams.
• Influence and align cross‑functional leaders — Engineering, Design, Data Science, Sales, Marketing — to drive coherent, company‑wide AI transformation.
• Represent the company's AI product strategy in external forums, analyst briefings, and customer advisory boards.
• Deliver key artifacts and metrics on a defined cadence:
  • AI Governance Framework & Decision Criteria – reviewed and refreshed within the first 90 days, then maintained ongoing.
  • AI Disruption Radar & Market Signals Report – delivered monthly.
  • AI Product Playbook – living document updated as needed.
  • PM AI Tooling Adoption Scorecard – reported monthly.
  • AI Architecture Strategic Requirements – aligned per planning cycle with the Chief Product Architect.
  • Executive & Customer AI Briefings – provided monthly or on demand.

Requirements

What We’re Looking For

Experience

• 10+ years in product management, product strategy, or technology strategy roles, with at least 3–5 years in AI/ML‑driven product development.
• Demonstrated experience defining and executing AI‑native product strategies — not just adding AI features, but reimagining products around AI capabilities.
• Proven track record of influencing without authority — driving alignment across product teams, engineering, and executive stakeholders in complex, matrixed organizations.
• Experience engaging directly with enterprise customers and C‑level executives to shape AI‑driven product vision.
• Prior work with or alongside platform/architecture teams to shape scalable technical foundations for product development.

Skills & Capabilities

• Deep AI/ML product fluency — you understand LLMs, generative AI, agentic workflows, RAG, fine‑tuning tradeoffs, and emerging AI tooling well enough to drive credible strategy and architecture conversations.
• Exceptional strategic thinking and synthesis — you can take complex, fast‑moving signals from the market and distill them into clear, actionable strategies.
• Strong executive communication and storytelling — your narratives are crisp, compelling, and calibrated for the audience.
• A builder’s mindset — you are hands‑on with AI tools in your daily work and thrive on improving your own productivity through them.
• Collaborative, curious, and comfortable with ambiguity and rapid iteration .

Preferred

• Experience in a multi‑product or platform company with portfolio‑level responsibility.
• Background in developer tools, SaaS, or enterprise software where AI is reshaping the competitive landscape.
• Familiarity with product‑led growth and modern AI product metrics.
• MBA or advanced degree in a relevant technical or business discipline (not required).

Why This Role

• Strategic leverage at scale: Your decisions ripple across every product line in the portfolio.
• Executive visibility: Direct access to and influence over CPO, CTO, and C‑suite.
• Own the AI future: Shape how an entire organization responds to the most transformative technology shift of our generation.
• No bureaucracy: Individual contributor with organizational authority — you build, advise, influence, and execute without management overhead.