Director of Product Management

Director of Product Management

Learning Ally | Full-Time, Permanent | Reports to: Chief Product Officer

Learning Ally is on a mission to radically change education and the way children who struggle to learn are supported both at home and in the classroom. We work with schools, districts and educators across the country, helping nearly 300,000 students with a goal to reach over 3m students who struggle to read become successful learners. We are a non-profit technology company with a human-read audiobook solution that combines the programs, products and services that educators need to get these students to read with frequency and build life-long academic, social and emotional success.

Position Summary

Learning Ally is seeking a Director of Product Management to serve as the lead individual-contributor product manager across both of the company's core products: the reading platform students and educators use every day, and the audiobook catalog that makes it valuable. This is a hands-on role. The Director owns the full product lifecycle, from discovery and prioritization through roadmap, design, build, and delivery, and is expected to operate with a high degree of independence. Reporting to the CPO, the Director brings a clear point of view on what to build and why, turns strategy into well-defined work for Engineering and production partners, and mentors a Product Manager on the team.

What This Role Owns

Product Strategy & Prioritization

• Translate company and CPO-level strategy into an outcome-based roadmap for the reading platform and the title catalog, with explicit goals and rationale behind every major investment.
• Run continuous discovery with students, educators, and district administrators using a jobs-to-be-done lens, turning usage data, support signals, and customer feedback into prioritized problems worth solving.
• Make and defend tradeoffs across new capability, platform stability, and catalog investment.

Product Delivery: Reader & Platform

• Own requirements, user flows, and acceptance criteria for the Reader, educator and administrator experiences, and LMS and rostering integrations (LTI, Canvas, Clever, ClassLink).
• Partner with Design and Engineering, including external development partners, from concept through release: shape scope, resolve ambiguity, run UAT, and own release readiness.
• Serve as the primary product contact for vendor engineering teams, holding them accountable for quality, versioned releases, and root cause analysis.
• Guide customers through the platform modernization, keeping migration milestones on track and the transition from legacy experiences clear.

Books as a Product: Title Production Partnership

• Treat every title as a product. Partner with the Title Production team to define what a great title looks like on the platform: narration (human and AI voice), EPUB structure, accessibility, and metadata.
• Own the connection between catalog and platform so books and the Reader work as one experience for students and educators.

Cross-Functional Partnership

• Act as the product voice to Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, and Academic Leadership through release communication, enablement, and input on packaging.
• Bring customer evidence into decisions and close the loop with field teams on what shipped and why.

Team Leadership

• Manage and mentor a Product Manager, building their skills in discovery, requirements, and delivery.
• Establish lightweight product practices (roadmap reviews, success metrics, launch checklists) that favor outcomes over process.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of product management experience, including owning products end to end in a B2B or B2B2C SaaS or ed-tech environment.
• Demonstrated ability to work independently across the full lifecycle: discovery, prioritization, roadmap, design partnership, requirements, delivery, and launch.
• Strong product judgment: sets goals, articulates the "why," and connects work to business outcomes rather than managing tickets and process.
• Experience directing external or offshore development partners and holding them to quality standards.
• Experience with content or media products (digital publishing, audiobooks, EPUB) or content production pipelines strongly preferred.
• Familiarity with K-12 ecosystems: LMS platforms (Canvas, Schoology, Google Classroom), LTI 1.3, and rostering standards (OneRoster, Clever, ClassLink).
• Working knowledge of accessibility standards (WCAG, EPUB Accessibility) and assistive reading technology.
• Experience mentoring or managing product managers.
• Passion for accessibility, structured literacy, or mission-driven education technology strongly preferred.

This position profile identifies the key responsibilities and expectations for performance. It cannot encompass all specific job tasks that an employee may be required to perform. Employees are required to follow any other job-related instructions and perform job-related duties as may be reasonably assigned by his/her supervisor.

Learning Ally is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability or veteran status.