Technical Product Manager Co-op, AI Strategic Hub (DASH)

Technical Product Manager Co-op, AI Strategic Hub (DASH)

D’Amore-McKim School of Business, Northeastern University

Eligibility: This co-op is open to current Northeastern University students only. You do not need to be a veteran, a military spouse, or have any military affiliation to apply. Veteran Hiring Solutions is supporting this search as part of a pilot with Northeastern. The only requirement is that you are an enrolled Northeastern student eligible for co-op.

Imagine being able to hear from the hiring manager before you apply. [https://youtu.be/LRDR12RU6gk]

Role Snapshot

Client D’Amore-McKim AI Strategic Hub (DASH), Northeastern University

Role Technical Product Manager Co-op

Location Northeastern Boston campus

Term One co-op semester

Hours 35 to 40 hours per week, with occasional off-hours response when production goes down

Reports to Kwong Chan, Executive Director, DASH

Team Multiple developer sub-teams building separate AI products

This role exists because DASH ships AI products to the public on a weekly cadence and needs one person who can hold multiple product roadmaps at once and keep developers moving.

Why This Role Matters

“Our number one mission is to augment human performance through AI.”

DASH is the D’Amore-McKim school’s AI build shop. It consults, it builds from the ground up, and it runs its own infrastructure. The team built its own AI servers by hand and tuned them for temperature, performance, and airflow until the configuration worked. Products move through dev, user acceptance testing, and a production platform, and the public uses what ships.

The gap is coordination. Several sub-teams are building several products at different speeds. Some ship in a week. Some sit in R&D for months. Hotfixes land while things are live. Without one person building the roadmaps, setting priorities, and running the sprints, the chaos stays chaos. This hire is the person who turns it into managed chaos.

The Mission

Over one co-op term, own the development of multiple AI products across planning, development, testing, and launch. Build the roadmaps. Define features. Set priorities. Run sprint planning. Coordinate developers, “which is like herding cats.” Talk to the end user. Ship weekly. As the hiring leader put it, “real artists ship,” and DASH ships.

Performance Objectives

Timeframes are set to the co-op term. Numeric targets below are proposed from the transcript and the DASH JD; the hiring manager should confirm them before posting.

• Ship product revisions on a weekly cadence across assigned products, measured by releases that move from dev through UAT to production each week.

• Build a working roadmap for every assigned product within the first 30 days, with features defined, priorities set, and tasks assigned, so each sub-team knows what it is building next.

• Deliver sprint commitments on time, measured by the share of planned sprint work completed inside the sprint.

• Catch defects in UAT before public launch, measured by issues resolved in testing versus hotfixes required after release.

• Report product progress and usage to faculty, clients, and leadership through dashboards that answer where each product stands without a meeting.

• Restore production when it goes down, measured by time to recovery, with backups and multiple servers now in place to make this rare.

Fit Traits

Thrives in managed chaos. Signal: “The best kind of background... are people that like managed chaos.” Sees software chaos quickly, usually because of a technical background, and starts organizing it rather than waiting for it to settle.

Ships. Signal: “Real artists ship. So we do ship product and revisions on a weekly basis.” Prefers a released version this week over a perfect version next month.

Does a lot with a little. Signal: “We built it from scratch, so we can run really lean and do a lot with very little.” Comfortable with hand-built infrastructure, lean budgets, and no vendor to call.

Leads with both kinds of authority. Signal: “The ability to use technical authority and soft authority.” Can influence a developer with a technical argument and influence a faculty stakeholder without one.

Shows up when it breaks. Signal: “If our server goes down on the weekend, you can be Batman.” Owns production, not just planning.

Who You’ll Work For

Kwong Chan is a faculty member at D’Amore-McKim and leads AI transformation for the business school as Executive Director of DASH. He came to Northeastern from industry, including a stint as an Associate Director at Nielsen, and has worked with companies including Samsung, Goodyear, VISA, and Nike. He has pioneered analytics education at the school and was recognized at DMSB Day 2025 for pitching a technology that uses AI to measure and improve human learning.

He describes the work as hands-on. His team built its own servers. He values people who can see a result, see where they are starting from, and plan the path between the two. He frames the hub’s purpose in human terms: making sure people are “not scared by AI, but empowered by AI.”

“If you’re able to see the results and see where you start, and then start planning a way to get from the start to the result, and you enjoy that, that’s the role for you.”

Requirements

Minimum:

- Current Northeastern student eligible for co-op

- Technical background: engineering, software development, or equivalent coursework and projects

- Experience in product or project management, including class projects, clubs, prior co-ops, or internships

- Working knowledge of Agile and sprint-based development

- Clear written and verbal communication with technical and non-technical people

- Comfort with data analysis and presenting results in dashboards or reports

- Ability to carry multiple projects with shifting priorities

Preferred:

- Familiarity with AI and machine learning

- Hands-on use of Jira, Figma, Notion, or analytics platforms and an understanding of how they create value for a team

Benefits

Who Does Well Here

This is a build seat, not a maintenance seat. People who finish this co-op leave with “skillsets and perspectives that the market didn’t know they wanted.” Past co-ops walked out knowing how to build a local AI solution that performs like a cloud solution, because they built one.

If you have led a project team that had less than it needed, shipped something real under a deadline, or taken responsibility for a system that other people depend on, you have done a version of this job. Student veterans, ROTC cadets, and Guard and Reserve members bring that experience naturally and are welcome to apply, but it is not required. The same experience from a startup, a club, a lab, or a prior co-op counts the same.

​ Imagine being able to hear from the hiring manager before you apply. [https://youtu.be/LRDR12RU6gk​]