AI Product Lead

About Schroders: We’re a global investment manager. We help institutions, intermediaries and individuals around the world invest money to meet their goals, fulfil their ambitions, and prepare for the future. We have around 5,000 people on six continents. And we’ve been around for over 200 years but keep adapting as society and technology changes. What doesn’t change is our commitment to helping our clients, and society, prosper.

Technology at Schroders: There's a huge amount of change going on at Schroders. Technology is shaping our business increasingly, so there are many opportunities waiting to be grabbed. And because we're a big financial player, we can put hefty backing behind good ideas. We're a serious business – we have enormous responsibilities to our clients and shareholders. But just because we're suited and booted, that doesn't make us stuffy; our tech teams are friendlier and more informal than you might expect.

The Team: The AI & Innovation team is Schroders’ centre of excellence for AI, delivering enterprise AI services and enabling high-value use cases that benefit the organisation and its clients. We develop internal AI products and services, with a current focus on the platform and operating model that will allow AI Agents to deliver value at scale across the enterprise. We collaborate with a wide range of teams across the firm, to oversee and support AI use cases utilizing our technology products, while also ensuring robust Responsible AI governance and promoting education and adoption. This is a high priority, high visibility area using cutting edge technology and we are moving at pace while managing competing priorities. You'll work with a team of enthusiastic individuals who are passionate about software in a financial context and bringing AI services into Schroders. They're also keen on driving positive technology change at Schroders, ensuring that we always stay ahead of the curve.

What you’ll do: In this role, you will lead the definition, evolution and delivery of AI products, our agentic infrastructure platform and reusable capabilities across the AI & Innovation portfolio. You will combine strong product leadership with a practical understanding of Generative AI, ensuring that we focus on valuable business problems rather than technology for its own sake. You will work closely with business leaders, users, Engineering and Delivery to set product direction, validate opportunities and turn strategy into measurable outcomes. You will be accountable for balancing customer desirability, technical feasibility, commercial viability and responsible use throughout the product lifecycle. AI products are probabilistic, fast-moving and dependent on the quality of their data, evaluation and operating controls. You will therefore ensure that products are designed around clear success measures, appropriate human oversight and evidence of real-world value. You will be prepared to adapt the roadmap as user needs, business priorities, technology capabilities and regulatory expectations evolve.

Key Responsibilities:

• Own and communicate the vision, strategy and roadmap for assigned AI products and capabilities.
• Represent customers, using insight into their needs and workflows to guide product decisions.
• Prioritise valuable problems, challenging whether AI is the right solution.
• Translate strategy into clear outcomes, priorities and a coherent roadmap and backlog.
• Lead discovery and experimentation to validate value, usability, feasibility and operational readiness.
• Define success measures across value, adoption, quality, reliability, risk and cost.
• Establish proportionate evaluation methods, quality thresholds and release criteria for AI capabilities.
• Communicate AI’s capabilities and limitations, including hallucination, bias, explainability and changing model behaviour.
• Embed Responsible AI, security, privacy and appropriate human oversight throughout the product lifecycle.
• Make transparent trade-offs between value, speed, quality, risk, cost and maintainability.
• Partner with Engineering and Delivery Leads to shape secure, scalable and achievable solutions.
• Align business owners and senior stakeholders around priorities, adoption and measurable outcomes.
• Guide build, buy, partner and reuse decisions based on value, capability and total cost.
• Decide when to scale, iterate, pivot, consolidate or retire products and features.
• Drive adoption, continuous improvement and value realisation.
• Assess emerging AI and product developments for their relevance to Schroders.
• Share product practices and lessons learned across the wider organisation.

What you’ll be like: Problem-led, outcome-focused and not wedded to a particular technology or feature. Commercially minded, linking user needs and product choices to measurable value. AI literate, with practical understanding of GenAI, LLMs and agents, including their limits and evaluation. Comfortable leading through uncertainty and making evidence-based decisions. A clear communicator, able to explain AI concepts, trade-offs and risks to varied audiences. Influential without authority, aligning business, users, engineering and risk partners. Decisive, prioritising hard and stopping low-value work when needed. Evidence-led and pragmatic, balancing data, user insight, technical evaluation and judgement. User-centred and trust-focused, designing products people understand, adopt and use responsibly. Responsible by design, treating privacy, security, fairness, explainability and accountability as core. Collaborative and low-ego, working well with Engineering, Delivery and subject-matter experts. Able to move between product strategy, stakeholder decisions, discovery and detailed delivery questions. Adaptable and curious, testing assumptions and adjusting as evidence, technology and regulation evolve. Pragmatic about whether to build, buy, partner, reuse or wait. Motivated by creating trusted products that deliver measurable outcomes.

We recognise potential, whoever you are. Our purpose is to provide excellent investment performance to clients through active management. Diversity of thought facilitated by an inclusive culture will allow us to make better decisions and better achieve our purpose. This is why inclusion and diversity are a strategic priority for us and why we are an equal opportunities employer: you are welcome here regardless of your age, disability, gender identity, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, socio-economic background or any other protected characteristics.