Director I IC, Product Research

The Team

This role sits on the Aerial Imagery Solutions Team within the Personal Lines Property & Specialty Product department. The team is responsible for managing and supporting initiatives that maximize the value aerial imagery can bring to Liberty Mutual. Our work spans both strengthening existing use cases and exploring new ones—from improving underwriting and pricing outcomes to identifying how aerial imagery can support quote prefill, marketing effectiveness, and other emerging business opportunities. The team also evaluates new products, vendors, and capabilities that could expand how Liberty Mutual uses aerial imagery across the business.

The Role

This role is designed around two core responsibilities. First, this person will serve as a close partner to our US Data Science teams, including those building and maintaining data infrastructure and those developing computer vision models. This individual will not be expected to build models or infrastructure directly, but they must be willing and able to go deep enough into the underlying work to understand it thoroughly, ask thoughtful questions, identify risks and dependencies, anticipate blockers, and help ensure technical efforts stay aligned to the highest-priority business needs. This role requires strong technical fluency, particularly around data pipelines, infrastructure dependencies, technical architecture, and operational workflow integration.

Second, this person will play a critical role in product research, strategy, and solution development for aerial imagery use cases. They will help identify where imagery can create business value, assess product enhancement opportunities, evaluate vendor and capability options, build business cases, and shape recommendations that influence strategic direction. This role is ideal for a product and strategy leader with strong technical fluency—ideally someone who has experience working closely with DS/ML teams and who is equally energized by research, problem-solving, business case development, and translating complex technical work into actionable business decisions.

The successful candidate will be comfortable operating as a doer, driver, and owner, depending on the work. They should be able to move fluidly between strategic thinking and execution, thrive in ambiguity, and bring the judgment, curiosity, and influence needed to lead high-visibility, cross-functional work. Success in this role requires balancing both dimensions well: serving as a strong connector between business and USDS while also independently driving product research, strategy, and business case development for new and enhanced aerial imagery use cases. This is a senior individual contributor role with director-level strategic leadership expectations.

Responsibilities and Attributes of the Ideal Candidate

• Excitement for building depth of expertise: Pursues a deep, multi-layered understanding of business problems, technical systems, workflows, and solution designs in order to surface unseen implications, anticipate stakeholder questions, and provide thoughtful leadership and innovative perspectives.
• Technical curiosity and cross-functional partnership: Works closely with US Data Science, data infrastructure, and computer vision/modeling teams to develop a strong understanding of their work, key dependencies, and execution risks. Engages credibly with technical teams without needing to be the technical builder.
• Business-to-technical translation: Translates effectively between technical and business partners, helping ensure technical work is well understood, aligned to top business priorities, and positioned to deliver meaningful value. Proactively identifies blockers, misalignment risks, and tradeoffs before they slow execution.
• Product research and opportunity development: Conducts research to identify, frame, and assess opportunities to expand or improve aerial imagery use cases. Explores new products, vendors, capabilities, and solution approaches, and helps determine where investments are most likely to create business value.
• Strategy and prioritization: Helps improve prioritization of aerial imagery investments by evaluating opportunities through the lens of business value, feasibility, strategic fit, technical dependencies, and operational impact. Supports clearer decision-making on where to invest, what to sequence, and how to maximize return.
• Business case development and valuation: Develops recommendations supported by sound business rationale, valuation, design analytics, and economics. Assesses both direct and indirect impacts of proposed solutions to support profitable growth and effective resource allocation.
• Design and solutioning: Uses analytics, research, and structured problem-solving to develop solution designs that account for business, operational, and technical considerations. Demonstrates strong intellectual curiosity and systems thinking in identifying practical, scalable opportunities.
• Operational and technical fluency: Builds understanding of technical architecture, data pipelines, infrastructure dependencies, operational workflows, and model-related considerations in order to ask better questions, guide stronger decisions, and ensure recommendations are grounded in how the work actually gets done.
• Project leadership in ambiguity: Manages complex, ambiguous, and high-visibility initiatives across diverse stakeholder groups. Provides structure where needed, drives alignment, and helps move work forward even when requirements, ownership, or paths are not fully defined.
• Influence and communication: Communicates clearly and persuasively with both technical and non-technical audiences, including senior leaders. Brings together data, business insight, and strategic judgment to influence decisions and build alignment across functions.
• Dedication to quality: Produces high-quality, well-structured, thoroughly vetted work that reflects strong standards of rigor, accuracy, and polish. Maintains a high bar in a highly visible capability area.
• Industry and domain perspective: Applies product, market, and industry knowledge to anticipate upstream and downstream impacts of recommendations, including effects on underwriting, pricing, prefill, distribution workflows, prospecting, marketing, and related business processes.