Product Director - Core Platform

Job Description

Job Description

Description:

At Red Rover, we believe there is no greater calling than to serve those who are shaping the minds of our future generations. K-12 education has become increasingly complex. Schools are expected to do more with less while also handling uncharted social situations - and they deserve better. Join us as we build creative, intuitive software solutions for school administration that help put the best educators in every school, every day.  

We keep our product engineering team small and incredibly talent-rich. We believe this helps us respond quickly to customer needs without a lot of red tape. Inspired by 37signals’ Shape Up methodology, our team consists of engineers, designers and customer experts that shape and pitch real-world problems together, then bet on the best solutions using science, creativity, and (a whole lot of) customer empathy.  

Who you are

You're someone who shares our passion for helping school administrators serve their educators, students, and community. You sit comfortably at the intersection of product, design, and engineering. You’ve built your career on turning raw feedback into product strategy that deliver real business and user outcomes, while being fluent enough in technical architecture to earn the trust of engineers.  

You’ve got passion for curating a robust platform of integrated experiences and guiding each contributing team to build something bigger than any one product line. You thrive in ambiguity, lead with curiosity, and know how to balance long-term platform investment against near-term delivery pressure. You're as comfortable facilitating an architectural discussion as you are writing acceptance criteria or sketching a user flow. 

What you'll do

• Own and evolve the Core Platform roadmap, balancing system resilience and performance investments with enabling new capabilities and expanding our mobile experience for product teams and customers.  
• Own the developer platform of services and libraries consumed by other teams, incl. design system, navigation, auth, and shared workflows.  
• Gather feedback and requests from internal stakeholders, customers, and prospects on challenges and opportunities that foster a unified, intuitive platform experience regardless of which product(s) a customer purchases. 
• Shape ideas in partnership with cross-product and engineering leaders into well-formed pitches that balance user needs, business goals, and technical feasibility. Define clear problem boundaries, success criteria, and possible approaches before work begins.  
• Pitch shaped work and lead the betting process with cross-functional platform stakeholders, aligning on tradeoffs and outcomes to ensure we’re solving the right problems at the right time.  
• Design and iterate on user flows, visual sketches/wireframes, and AI prototypes to communicate ideas and inform implementation.  
• Coordinate closely and creatively with product teams to keep making progress without allowing the Core Platform team to become a bottleneck.  
• Communicate platform decisions and rationale clearly and effectively across the company, ensuring alignment and transparency.  
• Champion a strong product culture centered around empathy, experimentation, and measurable outcomes. 

• You have 6+ years of experience in web/mobile product management roles (ideally leading solutions where the primary consumers are other dev teams).  
• You demonstrate strong product thinking and an uncanny ability to simplify complex jobs to-be-done into intuitive user experiences.  
• You understand and can clearly communicate complex technical and architectural concepts  to mixed audiences.  • You excel at framing the story of each user journey and bring clarity where there’s  uncertainty.  
• You lead with empathy, are energized by collaboration, and know when to zoom in on  details and when to stay focused on the big picture.  
• You value people over process, working code over extensive artifacts, collaboration over  itemized requirements, and responsiveness to change.   
• You avoid letting “perfect” get in the way of good, incremental progress towards your goal.  You view ambiguity as an opportunity to learn from others and try something new.  
• You hold yourself to exemplary personal and professional ethical standards and work well  in a team-oriented, collaborative environment.  
• You have experience in K-12, HR tech, B2B SaaS, or workflow-heavy platforms (a plus).