Product Development Analyst - Product Team

Hanover Research is seeking a Product Development Analyst to support the full product development lifecycle across Hanover’s growing portfolio of productized research offerings — the data management, analysis, reporting, and AI-driven research platforms used by Hanover’s clients and research staff. The role’s first assignment is a new AI-powered platform that automates the design and delivery of professional-grade survey research. This is a great opportunity for a candidate seeking real product management responsibility across data products, software, and applied AI.

About the role

The Product Development Analyst will be responsible for understanding overall business goals and client needs, developing user stories and requirements to fulfill those goals, conducting user testing, and piloting new workflows — and, where features are AI-driven, translating AI capabilities into requirements and evaluating outputs against product intent. This role will report to the product owner and will collaborate closely with colleagues on Hanover’s Engineering and Research teams.

An ideal candidate is organized, collaborative, articulate, and a rigorous thinker who enjoys complex, ambiguous problems — and who has already gotten hands-on with modern AI tools. This person will have a passion for product development, will be comfortable making judgment calls amid ambiguity and compromise, and will seek to understand and deliver on Hanover’s business objectives. The successful candidate will take pride in knowing they are playing a pivotal role in building one of the growth engines of our company.

This role is designed to grow. We are not expecting a finished product leader on day one; we are hiring for trajectory. The analyst who succeeds here will take on steadily increasing ownership — from writing requirements and testing new features toward driving product decisions, shaping quality and evaluation strategy (including for AI-driven systems), validating what we ship against product intent rather than just functionality, and leading cross-functional workstreams. Candidates should be excited by that destination, even if they are not there yet.

Responsibilities

• Product Design
  • Participate in discovery, problem solving, and UX workshops; brainstorm ideas for how products can be improved, including where LLM and agent capabilities can strengthen research workflows
  • Write user stories; clearly and succinctly document requirements and acceptance criteria for product features, including prompt and workflow design for AI-driven features
  • Clearly communicate user stories and requirements to design and engineering colleagues, supporting the creation of wireframes and technical design
• Development Sprints
  • Participate full time in an Agile (Scrum) development process, working day-to-day within the engineering sprint cadence
  • As a feature owner, explain requirements and provide feedback to developers
  • Conduct user acceptance testing
• Quality & Evaluation
  • Test new features against product intent — does the product meet the standard a professional researcher would hold? — not just technical functionality
  • Help build and maintain evaluation frameworks for AI-driven features, including test cases, output quality rubrics, and automated eval runs
  • Document failure modes and edge cases, and translate findings into backlog priorities
• Product Support
  • Proactively gather user feedback to inform backlog prioritization and the product roadmap
  • Respond to user help requests and document bugs
  • Create and maintain training resources and reference documentation
  • Support cross-functional coordination — over time, running meetings, maintaining project documentation, and helping allocate work across contributors

Qualifications

• Superior level of personal organization and time management; builds the process and structure that hold quality under deadline pressure.
• Able to understand and creatively solve complex problems at various levels of abstraction — from systems-level design down to in-the-weeds detail.
• An ownership mindset: takes responsibility for user-facing outcomes rather than just assigned tasks, drives decisions forward under ambiguity, and knows which tradeoffs to escalate.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, including the confidence to constructively challenge a technical solution when it conflicts with the right product experience.
• Enjoys a collaborative working environment and seeks colleagues’ input.
• Demonstrable interest in productized research, data products, software, and product management.
• Enthusiasm for a steep learning curve: energized, not intimidated, by helping to build products that have not been built before.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s Degree Required. Candidates are likely to have majored in Computer Science, Information Systems, Business, or Social Sciences, but candidates of any academic background with interest are encouraged to apply.
• Approximately 1–5 years of professional experience in product, research, analytics, software, or a related field preferred: we are hiring an early-career to mid-level candidate to grow into significant product ownership, not a finished senior profile.
• Hands-on familiarity with modern AI systems — LLMs, prompt design, agent workflows, and/or output evaluation strongly preferred. Professional experience is valuable, but substantive personal projects and self-directed work count.
• Nice to have:
  • Experience with Agile / SCRUM / Kanban
  • Experience with DevOps / Figma / Jira
  • Knowledge of product development methodologies
  • Familiarity with statistical methods and analytical approaches common to social science, including market research
  • Experience testing, evaluating, or performing QA on AI- or LLM-based systems

Location

USA Remote. Office is located in Arlington, VA.

Benefits

• Starting at 18+ days Paid Time Off
• 14 observed holidays, including Juneteenth, Indigenous People Day and personal floating days
• 401(K) employer matching programs
• Comprehensive health and dental benefits package
• Health and wellness packages with discounts to local gym
• Community service opportunities
• Unlimited snacks and beverages in office

Pay

The compensation range for this role at the company is $60,000 – $90,000. Please note that the base salary offered is contingent on the candidate’s job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Hanover believes in supporting our team’s overall well-being now and in the future. We provide retirement benefits and 401K matching to help you plan ahead, wellness benefits to keep you healthy, medical coverage to lift you up if you or your dependents get sick, and paid time away to rejuvenate.