Sr Product Manager, Student/Staff Experience

Role Description

Our client is seeking a Sr. Product Manager, Student and Staff Experience to own the end-to-end product journey for students, faculty, and administrators. As the first product hire, you will collaborate closely with the VP of Product to shape the roadmap and deeply understand user behavior in school districts. This role is built for the AI era; instead of just writing requirements, you will actively use AI code-generation tools to build functional, interactive prototypes that are 70–80% complete before handing them off to design and engineering.

What You Will Do

• Own the product direction for the student and staff experience, from validated problem statement through design, execution, and launch.
• Build interactive prototypes, fast. Use Claude and other AI prototyping tools to turn problems into working, clickable artifacts and iterate on them directly, rather than handing static specs to others to mock up.
• Hand off prototypes 70 to 80% complete, with flows, states, and edge cases worked through, plus the research, call recordings, and reasoning behind them, so design refines rather than reverse-engineers.
• Run customer discovery. Talk to educators, district staff, administrators, and where appropriate students, on a regular cadence, and understand what makes the product get adopted instead of ignored — by kids and adults alike.
• Drive prioritization with discipline. Say no to good ideas to protect great ones, and defend those calls with evidence when sales, customers, or leadership push.
• Write the problem statements and PRDs that carry work through our gated product process (intake, development readiness, prioritization, go/no-go, launch).
• Partner with engineering to stress-test feasibility, scope, and trade-offs before a single line of production code is written, including digging into data-model and reporting questions when the details matter.
• Partner with Customer Success, Sales, and Marketing on release and launch readiness so nothing reaches customers as a surprise.
• Define and track the metrics that tell you whether what you shipped actually changed behavior and engagement across students and staff, not just whether it shipped.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in product management, with senior or lead-level ownership of a product or major area and a track record of shipping digital products that users actually adopt.
• Deep K-12 EdTech product experience. You have built digital products used by students in the classroom and by faculty and staff at real scale, products that have touched the lives of millions of students and/or hundreds of thousands of educators.
• Demonstrated fluency with AI prototyping. You can show us working prototypes you have personally built with Claude or comparable AI tools. A portfolio of what you have made matters more than résumé bullet points.
• A track record of doing your own customer discovery, not outsourcing it.
• A deep grasp of the K-12 environment: the rhythm of the school calendar, how districts buy and decide, the daily realities of teachers, students, staff, and administrators, and what separates software that gets adopted across a building from software that gets abandoned.
• Fluency with student and staff data privacy and compliance (FERPA, COPPA, and state privacy laws) and a real understanding of how they shape product decisions.
• Strong product judgment and the backbone to push back on stakeholders, including sales and executives, with evidence rather than opinion.
• Clear, fast writing, and the temperament to thrive in a remote, fast-moving startup with little hand-holding.
• Enough technical fluency to reason about data models, integrations, and reporting with engineers, and to know when an answer does not add up.

Nice to Have

• District identity, rostering, and deployment: Clever, ClassLink, Google Workspace for Education, Microsoft 365, and SSO.
• Experience designing or building instructional curriculum or learning content for students, and an understanding of how sound instructional design translates into a product students actually complete.
• Experience with adult and professional learning — staff training, PD, or change management — and a feel for what makes mandatory training stick with busy adults rather than getting clicked through.
• Student and staff engagement and gamification, accessibility (WCAG), and designing for low-friction adoption across mixed and shared device environments (Chromebooks, shared logins).
• Experience designing admin, dashboard, and reporting surfaces that give district leaders visibility into adoption and risk without adding work.
• Cybersecurity or security awareness domain exposure.
• Experience integrating new capabilities into an existing platform.