Principal Product Manager

Cooley is seeking a Principal Product Manager (Private Companies) to join the Innovation team.

Position summary: As a leading technology law firm, Cooley is determined to become a leader in the digital practice of law. The Principal Product Manager, Private Companies (“Principal Product Manager”) is a senior, self-directed individual contributor who owns the product line for accelerating and augmenting private company financings across company-side and investor-side workflows. This role turns complex legal and operational processes into software-enabled products that are designed, shipped, adopted, measured, and continuously improved, including AI-enabled capabilities where they create practical value. The Principal Product Manager serves as the primary bridge between practice-group leadership, product, and engineering, ensuring that subject-matter expertise, business objectives, and product execution remain aligned throughout the product lifecycle. Operating with a high degree of autonomy, the Principal Product Manager sets product direction, makes roadmap tradeoffs, and drives delivery with a dedicated product squad, allocated engineering resources, dedicated budget, and executive sponsorship.

This role partners with software engineering by translating business goals into clear requirements, constraints, success measures, and long-term product needs; software engineering owns final technical design and implementation approach. This role will focus on practical outcomes, including deals conducted on-platform, time saved, data generated, quality improved, adoption achieved, and insights delivered. Specific duties and responsibilities include, but are not limited to, the following:

Position responsibilities:

Product roadmaps:

• Collaborate with Private Companies practice group leaders to identify and roadmap capabilities that maximize time-to-value, reduce manual effort, and improve quality, with explicit outcome targets (e.g., cycle time, adoption, error rate)
• Collaborate with senior Innovation Team leaders to ensure that Private Companies-facing products leverage shared platform components and create reusable capabilities where appropriate
• Make and communicate clear tradeoffs: what ships now, what is sequenced next, and what will not be pursued (and why)
• Run structured discovery (interviews, workflow observation, data review) to validate problems, quantify opportunity size, and define MVP scope
• Produce clear, reviewable product artifacts that enable predictable delivery, including PRDs/MVP briefs, acceptance criteria, and release notes appropriate to scope
• Define measurable success criteria for each increment, including baseline metrics, target outcomes, and post-launch evaluation method
• Ensure target-state workflows and operating rules, including roles, states, exceptions, and handoffs, are documented, comprehensive, and correct
• Ensure requirements are “shippable”: unambiguous scope, explicit non-goals, dependencies identified, and QA/validation approach defined

Key Performance Indicators:

• Define, measure, and maintain KPIs for each product and major workflow
• Ensure instrumentation is built into workflows by design
• Deliver dashboards and reporting that surface bottlenecks, trends, and improvement opportunities
• Track KPIs before and after rollout and proactively adjust roadmap and rollout strategies to maximize measured impact

Strategy:

• Develop and execute go-to-market strategies for launches, pilots, and scaled adoption
• Drive adoption through enablement, training, and working agreements with stakeholders
• Establish standards for workflow definitions, business processes, and reusable product capabilities
• Use outcome data and executive sponsorship to resolve disputes and standardize where needed
• Run regular operating reviews with leadership covering outcomes, adoption, investment tradeoffs, reuse, and roadmap priorities

Shipping:

• Drive delivery from MVP through scale: define the release plan, sequence increments, and maintain execution cadence with the cross-functional squad and stakeholders
• Pilot with real teams: launch controlled trials, measure outcomes, iterate rapidly, and operationalize what works into repeatable playbooks
• Partner with Practice Innovation, a dedicated innovation function composed of former practicing attorneys, to validate legal workflow assumptions and scale proven solutions
• All other duties as assigned or required

Skills and experience:

Required:

• After orientation at Cooley LLP, exhibit proficiency in the Microsoft Office suite, iManage, and other firm applications
• Ability to work extended and/or weekend hours, as required
• Ability to travel, as required
• 7+ years of directly applicable product management experience, including significant experience owning a product line or product area end to end
• Demonstrated success building and shipping workflow, automation, AI-enabled, or similarly complex products from conception through release and adoption
• Experience defining product roadmaps, MVP scope, KPIs, acceptance criteria, release plans, and measurable success criteria
• Experience productizing services or turning playbook-driven operations into scalable, repeatable products
• Experience driving adoption in stakeholder-rich environments through enablement, training, communications, and practical change management
• Demonstrated experience partnering with senior subject-matter experts, business leaders, or professional practitioners
• Domain knowledge of private company financings, venture financing, fund formation, or related company-side and investor-side legal workflows
• Experience with workflow platforms, document automation, AI-assisted tooling, process mining, or similar legal or professional-services technology

Preferred:

• Bachelor’s degree
• Technical fluency, including comfort working with engineering teams on APIs, integrations, enterprise system constraints, and modern application architectures
• Data fluency, including the ability to define useful metrics, reporting needs, workflow data models, and shared terminology for product and business teams
• Experience measuring product outcomes, business impact, adoption, operational efficiency, quality improvements, or related success metrics
• Prior large law firm, legal technology, or large management consulting firm experience
• Familiarity working with modern software platforms, enterprise applications, workflow systems, AI-enabled products, or related technologies

Competencies:

• Self-starter who can identify problems, form hypotheses, build test plans, and execute
• Ability to adjust based on learnings and independently suggest pivots and refinements to existing strategies
• Enthusiasm for legal technology and the challenge of bringing modern product thinking to high-stakes, high-trust environments where precision matters
• High emotional intelligence with the ability to build trust with senior stakeholders, navigate ambiguity with engineering leaders, and bring people along on difficult decisions
• A team player who can successfully and enthusiastically collaborate across various disciplines, functions, and levels of responsibility
• Ability to work effectively in time-sensitive situations and under significant pressure with meticulous attention to detail, including the ability to work on multiple initiatives simultaneously
• Strong verbal and written communication skills, including the ability to succinctly translate technical and complex details to a non-technical business audience
• Strong judgment
• Team-player with collaborative spirit
• Unwavering ability to handle and maintain confidentiality regarding firm information, projects, client data
• High level of professionalism at all times
• Proactive, analytical mindset
• Effective presentation skills

Cooley offers a competitive compensation and excellent benefits package and is committed to fair and equitable employment practices.

EOE.