Product Lead

About Think of Us

Think of Us (TOU) is transforming the child welfare system into one where young people and families can heal, develop, and thrive. We drive purpose-driven work aligned with meaningful systems change, powered by data and the insights of lived experience. Our focus is on prevention, keeping families strong before crisis, and on building kinship-first systems so children grow up with people they know and trust. Through bold collaborations with leaders and innovators across the public and private sectors — from Presidential Administrations to local providers — we identify leverage points and co-create solutions that re-architect child welfare for the future.

Here’s what this looks like:

• Built the Lived Experience Engine into the largest dataset of its kind (51,000+ voices), powering AI tools and shaping reforms

• Partnered with California to launch the Kinship Accelerator in 8 counties, backed by $150M and a budget increase from $317M → $896M

• Drove a national kin-first shift: 39 states (plus 5 tribes) adopting kinship standards, unlocking $3B for families

• Operate one of the largest direct resource networks, connecting 1,827 families to $28M+ in support

Our team members share a commitment to driving systems change through creative problem-solving, obsessive curiosity, and a love of quickly driving innovative, measurable, and impactful results.

Position Overview

Department: Technology & Innovation

Reports to: Executive Leadership

Direct Reports: N/A

Location: Hybrid; Washington, DC (min. 3 days in the office)

Category: Full Time/Exempt

This is the first dedicated product-management role for the ConnectMe platform, taking over day-to-day product ownership from Executive Leadership.

You will translate Think of Us’ organizational strategy, program goals, user needs, lived experience insights, and technical opportunities into a clear product strategy and roadmap. You will own decisions about what gets built, in what order, why it matters, and what the team will not pursue.

Your primary focus will be ConnectMe, a reimagining of our resource navigation warmline that connects young people and families involved with the child welfare system to the resources and support they need. As Think of Us identifies additional product opportunities, you will also help evaluate and shape emerging ideas without allowing every promising concept to become an immediate roadmap commitment.

We operate as a modern, AI-enabled product team. We define the outcomes we are trying to create, prototype and ship, measure performance in the real world, learn from users and operational evidence, and iterate.

This is not government contracting or build-to-spec work. Our users include Think of Us staff and the children, young people, families, and caregivers they serve. State partners help us deploy and operate our services, while Think of Us retains responsibility for the core product direction and roadmap.

The role requires the seniority to operate with significant autonomy in a lean, high-stakes environment, the technical fluency to make sound tradeoffs with engineers, and the judgment to recognize that not every organizational or operational problem should be solved through software..

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How This Role Works with Leadership

Think of Us’ CEO plays an active role in shaping the organization’s strategy and innovation agenda, identifying new opportunities, and setting the ambition and risk appetite for major product investments.

The Product Lead is responsible for translating that strategic direction into a focused and executable product strategy. You will engage directly with ambitious and evolving executive ideas, clarify the underlying intent, test assumptions, and make clear recommendations about priority, scope, sequencing, tradeoffs, and risk.

You are not expected to passively implement executive ideas, and an idea raised by an executive does not automatically become a roadmap commitment. You are expected to challenge assumptions constructively, make the implications for users, capacity, technical complexity, and existing priorities visible, and recommend the best path forward.

Program leadership owns program outcomes, the service and practice model, safety, implementation, and field performance. The Product Lead owns product strategy, roadmap, prioritization, feature scope, product outcomes, and release decisions.

The Lead Product & UX Designer owns research practice, interaction design, service experience, human-AI experience, and design quality. Engineering owns technical architecture, security, reliability, and implementation. Data and AI colleagues own the technical data platform, evaluation infrastructure, analysis, and AI quality evidence.

The Product Lead brings these perspectives together into coherent product decisions.

About ConnectMe

ConnectMe is a warmline and resource navigation platform where Community Responders work directly with help-seekers, including young people and families connected to the child welfare system.

The platform is launching across multiple states. AI plays a growing role behind the scenes. It can draft an initial assessment and support plan for a responder to review and refine, suggest local resources matched to a family’s situation, and flag requests that may need urgent attention.

In every case, AI should work in service of the people doing the work. It prepares, assists, and suggests, while people remain responsible for reviewing, correcting, deciding, and acting before information reaches a young person or family.

Because this is sensitive work in a regulated and privacy-protected environment, product decisions must account for where AI creates value, where human judgment must remain central, how uncertainty is communicated, what safeguards are required, and how trust is earned.

Over the coming year, the work will deepen. We will develop better tools for the staff who support families, learn more about how young people and caregivers want to share information and seek support in moments of stress, and make careful choices about how AI supports rather than replaces the human relationship at the center of the service.

Key Responsibilities

Own the Product Roadmap

• Define and maintain the ConnectMe product roadmap within Think of Us’ organizational strategy and program goals.

• Decide what gets built, in what order, why it matters, and what the team will not pursue.

• Frame work in terms of outcomes, including the change in user experience, staff behavior, service quality, or operational performance the team is trying to create.

• Prioritize across feature opportunities, user feedback, operational needs, defects, technical debt, research findings, and state requests.

• Make tradeoffs among speed, scope, quality, learning, safety, and long-term sustainability visible.

• Present the roadmap clearly to leadership, program teams, technology teams, and state partners.

• Revisit roadmap decisions when meaningful new evidence or organizational direction emerges.

Evaluate Emerging Product Opportunities

• Write clear, well-scoped product and feature definitions that include the problem, hypothesis, intended outcome, success criteria, constraints, risks, and expected learning.

• Work with the Lead Product & UX Designer to ensure the experience is sufficiently researched and designed before development begins.

• Work with Engineering to understand feasibility, architecture, security, privacy, maintenance, and technical debt implications.

• Identify scope creep, hidden complexity, unclear requirements, and unresolved assumptions before they become delivery problems.

• Own acceptance criteria and product release decisions once required cross-functional reviews are complete.

• Document major decisions and the tradeoffs behind them.

Shape AI Quality and Human-in-the-Loop Design

• Determine where AI genuinely helps and where human expertise, conventional software, operatio