Role: AI Product Manager with Retail and Fashion
Location: Costa Mesa, CA
Duration : Fulltime (Travel to Costa Mesa, CA)
Job Description:
EMIDS is embedding a small, senior team inside a global apparel company’s AI-native brand sprint — a 90-day effort to design, manufacture, and place real products on retail shelves using an end-to-end AI pipeline. No legacy process. No agency model. Built from scratch.
The AI Product Manager is the connective tissue of the tiger team. You sit at the intersection of what the AI tools can actually do and what the design, merchandising, and marketing teams need to achieve. You own the pilot roadmap, drive tool selection decisions, and make sure the five chevrons — insights, design, supply chain, marketing, selling — are moving in parallel rather than waiting on each other.
What You Will Do:-
• Own the day-to-day pilot roadmap — what gets built, in what order, with which tools, by whom
• Evaluate, select, and onboard AI tools across all five chevrons of the product creation pipeline
• Translate between the client’s business requirements and the technical capabilities of the EMIDS team — you speak both languages fluently
• Identify and eliminate bottlenecks as the pipeline is assembled — your job is to keep the team moving toward shelf-ready product in 90 days
• Define and track the metrics that matter: time from insight to tech pack, sample cycle time, content production cost per SKU, sell-through rate
• Facilitate daily working rhythms across the tiger team — standup cadence, decision logs, tool documentation — without adding process overhead
• Feed learnings back into a documented, repeatable process that can scale to other categories and brands after the pilot
What You Need:-
• Demonstrated experience shipping AI-powered products in a retail, fashion, e-commerce, or consumer goods context — not just advising on AI strategy, but owning the delivery of something that went live
• Deep familiarity with the AI tool landscape for fashion and retail — trend forecasting, generative design, 3D sampling, content production, social commerce — you do not need to operate every tool but you need to know what each one does and where it breaks
• Strong product instincts: you can make a tool selection decision with incomplete information, commit to it, and adjust when the evidence changes
• Experience working in small, cross-functional teams on compressed timelines — you are comfortable with ambiguity and do not need a defined brief to start moving
• Ability to hold the full five-chevron picture in your head while managing day-to-day execution details
• Excellent written communication — process documentation is an explicit deliverable of this engagement, not an afterthought
What You Do Not Need:-
• A fashion industry background — the client is actively seeking outside-in thinking
• Program management experience at a large consulting firm — this role requires product judgment, not project administration
• Experience with enterprise transformation or large-scale change management — the pilot is eight to ten people and 90 days; keep it simple
Location & Commitment
Primary point of coordination for the tiger team. Available across time zones as needed for the Costa Mesa-based client team. Remote-first with periodic in-person sprints. Full-time commitment for the duration of the pilot.
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