Principal Product Manager - Data & AI Products
McKinsey & Company · Düsseldorf +3 · 1h ago
Staff / Lead / PrincipalOn-siteProduct Management
Who you'll work with
Driving lasting impact and building long-term capabilities with our clients is not easy work. You are the kind of person who thrives in a high performance/high reward culture - doing hard things, picking yourself up when you stumble, and having the resilience to try another way forward.
In return for your drive, determination, and curiosity, we'll provide the resources, mentorship, and opportunities you need to become a stronger leader faster than you ever thought possible. Your colleagues—at all levels—will invest deeply in your development, just as much as they invest in delivering exceptional results for clients. Every day, you'll receive apprenticeship, coaching, and exposure that will accelerate your growth in ways you won’t find anywhere else.
When you join us, you will have:
- Continuous learning: Our learning and apprenticeship culture, backed by structured programs, is all about helping you grow while creating an environment where feedback is clear, actionable, and focused on your development. The real magic happens when you take the input from others to heart and embrace the fast-paced learning experience, owning your journey.
- A voice that matters: From day one, we value your ideas and contributions. You’ll make a tangible impact by offering innovative ideas and practical solutions, all while upholding our unwavering commitment to ethics and integrity. We not only encourage diverse perspectives, but they are critical in driving us toward the best possible outcomes.
- Global community: With colleagues across 65+ countries and over 100 different nationalities, our firm’s diversity fuels creativity and helps us come up with the best solutions for our clients. Plus, you’ll have the opportunity to learn from exceptional colleagues with diverse backgrounds and experiences.
- World-class benefits: On top of a competitive salary (based on your location, experience, and skills), we provide a comprehensive benefits package to enable holistic well-being for you and your family.
What you'll do
You will lead the product function, roadmap, and delivery of data- and AI-enabled products that drive client and business value.
You will manage two Product Managers, raising the product quality bar and supporting their growth. You must bring deep product judgment and technical fluency to collaborate with data, engineering, analytics, and AI teams.
You will join McKinsey’s Growth, Marketing & Sales (GM&S) Practice within the GM&S Solutions Platform team, building data and technology solutions for consumer-packaged goods (CPG) and retail clients.
The team develops scalable data platforms, pipelines, and analytics products that transform complex commercial, customer, and operational data into actionable insights, blending modern cloud data engineering with McKinsey’s industry expertise.
You will lead product management for a ~50-person Data organization, serving in the leadership group and taking accountability for delivery across five teams. Your role covers the entire lifecycle: framing problems, defining vision, prioritizing roadmaps, guiding execution, and iterating based on impact.
Collaborating with cross-functional technical teams and stakeholders, you will define product vision, roadmaps, and success metrics (e.g., adoption, cycle time, reliability). You will translate user needs and technical constraints into clear requirements, leveraging firm-approved AI tools responsibly to accelerate delivery.
To ensure structured execution, you will establish a disciplined intake model with clear criteria, owners, and commitments. You will make critical product trade-offs (balancing value, data quality, governance, and speed) to prioritize scalable platform capabilities that reduce bespoke work and improve cost-to-serve.
You will drive products from discovery to launch and adoption, maintaining direct contact with clients and users to ensure visibility into progress and risks. You will build feedback loops with Client Service Teams to turn field learnings into reusable platform improvements, and align with downstream application owners on data contracts and schema changes.
Your communication will be concise and decision-oriented, focusing on outcomes, roadmap choices, risks, and capacity trade-offs. You will establish robust operating mechanisms for tracking backlog, dependencies, release readiness, and stakeholder alignment to improve the quality and usability of data products.
To ensure operational resilience, you will mitigate capacity constraints and single points of failure. You will lead complex cross-functional initiatives, align senior stakeholders, and coach the two PMs reporting to you to foster a high-performing culture of product discipline, accountability, and continuous improvement.
Working as a peer to the Data Architect, you will hold distinct but closely aligned responsibilities. You own the product strategy, user value, roadmaps, and the product operating model, holding sole authority over demand—determining what gets prioritized, deferred, or declined. The Data Architect owns technical architecture, engineering standards, and execution.
Together, you will co-own and jointly set delivery commitments, capacity plans, risk mitigations, and release-readiness decisions, maintaining a constructive partnership and shared accountability for reliable product delivery.
Your background
- 8+ years of product experience owning complex data, platform, or AI products
- 2+ years managing and coaching product managers
- Prior experience in management consulting or a multi-stakeholder professional services environment, ideally within retail, CPG, or RGM
- Strong technical fluency to collaborate with engineering and architecture teams on data pipelines, APIs, and complex platform dependencies
- Deep practical grasp of core data concepts, including quality, lineage, governance, privacy, security, and data contracts
- Experience building and scaling ML or generative AI products, including managing sensitive data and the underlying infrastructure they require
- Ability to use AI and agentic tools effectively and responsibly to accelerate research, requirements, and product workflows
- Complete ownership of the product lifecycle, from discovery and roadmap strategy to delivery, launch, adoption, and value-driven iteration
- Strong discipline in managing complex dependencies, establishing clear acceptance criteria, and delivering reliably in ambiguous, fast-paced environments
- Exceptional stakeholder management skills, with the ability to structure complex choices into clear recommendations for senior leadership
- Based in a designated hiring office, with the flexibility to collaborate across global time zones and McKinsey's expert network