Remote
Adalat AI is building an end-to-end justice tech stack that automates manual and clerical pain points in courtrooms, giving judges back time to focus on what matters most: decision-making and delivering justice. Our products — AI-powered transcription in Indian languages, court dashboards, WhatsApp chatbots for litigants and advocates, AI-powered workflows for judges and registries, and the Paperless Courts platform that lets a state run its judiciary end-to-end on Adalat's infrastructure — are now deployed across 10 states, covering nearly 25% of India's judiciary.
Our work has been the subject of a Stanford case study, has won the Harvard President's Innovation Challenge, MIT Solve, and the AI Innovation Challenge at the Global AI Summit, and has been profiled in the Wall Street Journal. Backed by leading technology companies and funders, and incubated at MIT and Oxford, Adalat AI is working to eliminate judicial delays and expand access to timely justice. Founded by a team with backgrounds in law, technology, and economics from Harvard, Oxford, MIT, and IIIT Hyderabad, we are scaling rapidly across India and the Global South.
Role Overview
Why This Role Exists
Adalat AI builds secure AI for justice systems. Our products are already used in 5,300+ courtrooms across 10 Indian states — roughly 25% of the country's judiciary — and we are expanding across India and the Global South.
The environment is unusually demanding. A missed word can change the meaning of a judicial order. A workflow that looks elegant in a prototype can fail in a courtroom with patchy internet, unfamiliar hardware, and deeply embedded institutional routines. Product judgment here has to come from the people closest to each part of the problem: judges and court staff, lawyers, researchers, designers, engineers, and ML practitioners.
That is why Adalat AI intentionally has no traditional product-manager hierarchy.
We distribute the work commonly bundled into a PM role across specialists:
Product Designers shape the interaction and experience.
Legal Associates protect legal and domain integrity.
Engineers own technical judgment and help shape the product—not merely execute a specification.
Product Leads keep each pod's research-to-build pipeline moving.
The CTO sets strategic direction and breaks portfolio-level ties.
This model has given us strong local ownership. As the number of products and pods grows, we now need stronger connective tissue across them: shared standards, portfolio coherence, better decision-making, and a product craft that compounds rather than fragments.
The Head of Product exists to build that connective tissue.
This is not a conventional CPO role and not a PM-of-PMs role. You will not absorb product judgment from the pods or become the approval step for every decision. You will make the distributed system work better—across Judge's Chamber, Live Court, Translation, Paperless Courts, Litiga AI, our WhatsApp access layer, Vigil, and products still to be imagined.
What This Role Is Not
Not a central product owner. You do not personally decide what every pod builds.
Not a backlog or PRD factory. You may write or edit a critical spec when the situation needs it, but your job is to improve the organisation's ability to think and write clearly.
Not a layer between builders and users. Engineers, designers, researchers, analysts, and lawyers should remain in direct contact with one another and with the field.
Not a meeting operator. Cadence is useful only when it improves a decision, surfaces risk, or accelerates learning.
Not empire building. Success is not measured by how many PMs report to you. We expect to preserve the specialist, pod-based model as we scale.
Not product theatre. Polished decks, roadmap certainty, and imported Silicon Valley rituals matter far less than evidence, judgment, and whether the product works in court.
Key Responsibilities
Your Mandate
Build a product organisation in which excellent decisions happen close to the problem, while the portfolio still feels like one Adalat AI.
You will be accountable for the health of Adalat's product practice: how evidence becomes a bet, how bets become usable and trustworthy systems, how teams make trade-offs, and how learning travels across pods.
If this role works, product quality and strategic coherence rise without decisions becoming centralised around you.
What You Will Do
Strengthen the distributed product model
Turn our principles into a clear operating system for discovery, prioritisation, design, delivery, launch, and learning.
Make decision rights explicit so teams know who recommends, who contributes, who decides, and when an issue needs escalation.
Coach Product Leads to run healthy pipelines and make well-framed trade-offs without turning them into traditional PMs.
Help Product Analysts, UX Researchers, Product Designers, Legal Associates, engineers, and ML practitioners raise the quality of their own product judgment.
Notice when the model is creating gaps, duplicated work, or decision paralysis—and fix the system rather than quietly taking the work back yourself.
Create coherence across the portfolio
Hold the cross-product view: shared user journeys, platform capabilities, design patterns, data and ML dependencies, institutional commitments, and sequencing across pods.
Synthesize pod-level roadmaps into a legible portfolio narrative for the CTO, founders, and the wider organisation.
Surface collisions early: two pods solving the same problem differently, a local choice creating platform debt, or a partnership commitment outrunning product readiness.
Facilitate portfolio trade-offs with evidence from users, legal context, design, engineering capacity, model readiness, security, and expected impact.
Partner with the CTO, Head of Engineering, ML Lead, Security, and product specialists on decisions that cross team boundaries.
Raise the quality bar
Define what "ready to build," "ready to pilot," and "ready to deploy in a court" mean at Adalat AI.
Establish lightweight review mechanisms for high-stakes product bets and launches—strong enough to protect users, but not so heavy that teams stop moving.
Review products against their original user and research intent, and call out when implementation has drifted.
Make outcome measurement part of product work from the beginning: transcription accuracy, task completion, drafting time, adoption, reliability, and meaningful justice-system outcomes—not feature counts or ceremony completion.
Protect security, privacy, legal accuracy, accessibility, multilingual performance, and real-world operability as product concerns, not downstream checks.
Keep the organisation close to courts
Spend meaningful time in courtrooms and with the people who use or are affected by our products.
Help turn field observations, Voice of Customer signals, usage data, legal context, and usability research into a shared evidence base.
Ensure that institutional requests are understood without automatically becoming roadmap commitments.
Build a learning loop in which pods can trace major decisions back to evidence and revisit them as reality changes.
Build product craft and leadership capacity
Create critique, coaching, and learning rituals that improve judgment across disciplines.
Develop shared tools and language for problem framing, product bets, experiments, product specifications, and post-launch evaluation.
Help hire and develop exceptional Product Leads, Analysts, Researchers, Designers, and other product contributors as the organisation grows.
Represent Adalat's product approach credibly with court leaders, funders, partners, and the broader technology community.
Your influence should come from context, judgment, coaching, and the quality of the decision process—not from being a universal approver. On high-stakes issues involving user harm, legal integrity, security, or institutional trust, you are expected to challenge directly and escalate when necessary.
Qualifications
Essential
Exceptional product judgment. You have repeatedly helped teams decide what to build, what not to build, and how to learn—especially when the answer was ambiguous and the consequences mattered.
Experience leading through influence. You have improved product quality across multiple teams without making yourself the bottleneck. You can coach senior specialists and challenge peers without relying on hierarchy.
Organisational design instinct. You understand how roles, decision rights, incentives, and cadences shape outcomes. You can distinguish a capability gap from a process gap or a leadership gap.
Systems thinking. You can hold a portfolio of products and shared capabilities in your head, see second-order effects, and make complexity legible to others.
Strong research and evidence orientation. You are comfortable combining field observation, qualitative research, product data, technical constraints, and domain expertise into a point of view.
Respect for expert builders. You believe engineers, designers, researchers, and domain experts should be product thinkers—not recipients of requirements.
High-stakes product experience. You have built in legal tech, civic tech, govtech, healthcare, financial infrastructure, enterprise systems, or another environment where trust, reliability, privacy, and adoption cannot be hand-waved.
Clear communication. You can move between judges, lawyers, researchers, designers, engineers, ML practitioners, and institutional leaders without flattening their concerns into generic product language.
Mission alignment. You want your craft to improve justice systems, including for users and institutions very unlike those of a typical software company.
We care more about the texture of your judgment than a precise number of years or a sequence of PM titles. As a guide, strong candidates will usually bring substantial end-to-end product experience and several years of cross-team leadership.
Especially valuable
Experience building for government or public institutions in India or the Global South.
Experience with multilingual, low-connectivity, privacy-sensitive, or AI-enabled products.
Evidence of developing other product leaders and improving an organisation's product practice.
A willingness to spend time in courts and learn the domain with humility.
What You Will Achieve in a Year
By month 3
You have spent meaningful time in courts and can describe where our internal assumptions diverge from courtroom reality.
You understand each pod's product, people, decision rights, evidence base, dependencies, and most important unresolved questions.
You have identified the two or three highest-leverage changes to our product operating system.
Product specialists experience you as a source of clarity and better judgment—not as a new approval layer.
By month 6
The portfolio is legible: teams and leadership can see the major bets, dependencies, risks, evidence, and outcome measures without forcing every pod into an identical roadmap template.
Product Leads run stronger pipelines; decisions are faster and better framed; unresolved trade-offs reach the right forum.
At least one cross-pod product or platform issue has been resolved before it became expensive.
High-stakes pilots have explicit readiness standards and learning plans.
By month 12
Adalat's products feel more coherent across workflows, language, design, data, and institutional experience.
Teams can trace meaningful roadmap choices to evidence from the field, usage, legal context, and technical feasibility.
Product quality has improved in measurable ways, and post-launch learning routinely changes what teams do next.
The distributed model works better because you are here—and does not require you to sit in every meeting or make every call.
The CTO spends less time resolving avoidable product ambiguity and more time on architecture, AI strategy, and the hardest portfolio trade-offs.
Benefits and Perks
WFH with flexible work hours.
Unlimited PTO.
Autonomy and ownership.
Learning & development resources.
Smart, humble, and friendly peers.
Generous vacation.
Maternity and paternity leaves.
Contacts within the Harvard / MIT / Oxford ecosystem.