Curriculum Project Manager

Job Description

Job Description

Description

The Curriculum Project Manager is responsible for turning Summit K12’s curriculum priorities into clear, executable project plans and ensuring work moves predictably through the Curriculum Lifecycle—from requirements and architecture through gold-standard prototype, production, quality assurance, implementation/evidence, and continuous improvement. The role creates the operational structure, visibility, coordination, and accountability required for curriculum teams to deliver high-quality work on time and at scale.

Working closely with the Executive Director of Curriculum & Learning, Domain Directors, Principal Curriculum Designers, Learning Experience Designers, Senior Curriculum Writers, Curriculum Writers, Editors, Product Management and Operations, Engineering, Assessment Design, Creative Studio, Professional Learning, and external production partners, the Curriculum Project Manager coordinates timelines, dependencies, handoffs, resources, risks, decisions, and readiness checkpoints across multiple concurrent initiatives.

This is not an academic design role. The Curriculum Project Manager does not own curriculum architecture, pedagogy, domain standards, gold-standard prototypes, or academic acceptance criteria; academic leaders and instructional designers own those decisions. The Curriculum Project Manager makes the operating system visible and executable so the right work reaches the right people at the right time, unresolved issues are surfaced early, and projects advance only when required inputs and readiness criteria are in place.

Key Responsibilities

1. Curriculum Lifecycle & Project Planning

• Build and maintain integrated project plans for curriculum initiatives across requirements, architecture, prototype, production, QA, implementation/evidence, and continuous improvement.
• Partner with the product’s project manager to translate approved product priorities into clear curriculum workstreams, including curriculum specific scopes, milestones, deliverables, owners, dependencies, decision points, readiness criteria, and target dates.
• Collaborate with the product’s project manager to plan and facilitate project kickoffs, lead curriculum-focused kickoffs and working sessions that clarify what must be decided, developed, reviewed, approved, and handed off at each stage of the project development process.
• Ensure work does not move prematurely into large-scale production before required architecture, gold-standard prototypes, specifications, templates, and acceptance criteria are sufficiently defined.
• Maintain visibility across multiple concurrent curriculum initiatives and identify conflicts, sequencing issues, and downstream impacts early.

2. Production Planning, Scheduling & Capacity

• Develop and maintain production schedules across internal curriculum teams, editors, Learning Experience Design, Creative Studio, working with Product/Engineering dependencies, and approved external production partners.
• Coordinate workload and capacity information with the Executive Director and curriculum leaders to support realistic commitments and resource decisions.
• Track planned versus actual progress, cycle time, milestone completion, and production throughput and surface emerging capacity constraints.
• Support scenario planning when priorities, timelines, staffing, or scope change and make tradeoffs and impacts visible to decision-makers.
• Coordinate production waves so internal experts can focus on architecture, prototypes, calibration, and high-value quality decisions rather than avoidable administrative follow-up.

3. External Production Coordination

• Operationalize external production plans after academic leaders have established the architecture, prototypes, specifications, templates, and acceptance criteria required for successful execution.
• Coordinate onboarding, schedules, deliverables, handoffs, dependencies, documentation, feedback cycles, and acceptance workflows for approved external production partners.
• Ensure external partners receive the correct and current source materials, specifications, templates, prototypes, rubrics, and supporting documentation before work begins.
• Track partner progress, first-pass acceptance, revision cycles, recurring issues, and schedule or capacity risks and escalate patterns to the appropriate academic or operational owner.
• Maintain clear boundaries between project/vendor coordination and academic quality decisions: external work is assessed by the designated academic reviewers against established criteria.

4. Readiness Gates, QA Coordination & Handoffs

• Coordinate readiness checkpoints across the Curriculum Lifecycle and verify that required inputs, decisions, documentation, and approvals are complete before work advances.
• Maintain visibility into solution-specific acceptance criteria and ensure reviewers and production teams are working from the approved criteria and current versions.
• Coordinate with product’s project manager to ensure academic QA, editorial, product, technical, accessibility, and publishing handoffs without assuming ownership of the specialized quality decisions performed by those functions.
• Track defects, revisions, unresolved decisions, and rework patterns and help identify where workflow, specifications, timing, or handoffs may be contributing to recurring problems.
• Ensure final release and implementation handoffs are documented, complete, and visible to the teams responsible for launch, professional learning, customer implementation, and evidence collection.

5. Cross-Functional Coordination & Decision Management

• Serve as the central coordination point for assigned curriculum initiatives, ensuring stakeholders understand commitments, dependencies, decisions, and next steps.
• Facilitate project meetings, milestone reviews, readiness reviews, and working sessions with clear agendas, decisions, owners, and follow-through.
• Maintain decision logs, action items, risk registers, dependency trackers, and other project artifacts needed for reliable execution.
• Surface unresolved academic, product, technical, resource, or scope decisions to the correct owner rather than allowing ambiguity to become downstream rework.
• Coordinate cross-functional handoffs among Curriculum & Learning, Product Management and Operations, Engineering, Assessment & Learning Analytics, Creative Studio, Professional Learning, Customer Success, and other partners.

6. Risk, Scope, Budget & Change Management

• Identify schedule, scope, dependency, resource, quality, and external-partner risks early and maintain clear mitigation and contingency plans.
• Use an explicit change process when new requests or late additions affect committed scope, capacity, budget, sequencing, or release timing.
• Make the impact of proposed changes visible before commitments are made, including what must move, stop, shrink, or receive additional resources.
• Support project-level budget, contractor, and production-cost tracking in partnership with the Executive Director and appropriate business owners.
• Escalate issues based on defined decision rights and material impact rather than relying on informal or last-minute intervention.

7. Project Visibility, Metrics & Executive Reporting

• Maintain accurate project dashboards and status reporting that show progress, milestone health, dependencies, risks, decisions, capacity concerns, and upcoming gates.
• Provide concise, decision-oriented updates to the Executive Director and other leaders, distinguishing information from issues that require action or escalation.
• Track operational measures such as on-time milestone completion, cycle time, first-pass acceptance, revision burden, external-partner performance, and readiness-gate adherence.
• Use project data to improve forecasting accuracy, identify bottlenecks, and strengthen future planning.
• Ensure project documentation is current, organized, accessible, and sufficiently clear for teams to work from a shared source of truth.

8. Process Improvement & AI-Enabled Operations

• Identify recurring workflow friction, unnecessary handoffs, duplicated effort, unclear ownership, or avoidable rework and recommend improvements to the Curriculum Lifecycle.
• Develop and maintain practical project-management templates, checklists, dashboards, workflows, and standard operating practices that improve consistency without adding unnecessary bureaucracy.
• Use approved AI and automation tools to improve project planning, status synthesis, risk identification, documentation, workflow administration, and reporting while maintaining appropriate human review and data protections.
• Partner with curriculum leaders to ensure operational systems support—rather than replace—academic judgment, design ownership, and rigorous quality review.
• Help build a culture of early alignment, clear commitments, disciplined change management, and continuous improvement.

The Curriculum Project Manager succeeds when curriculum work moves through a visible, disciplined life cycle with clear ownership, realistic plans, timely decisions, strong handoffs, and fewer surprises. Teams know what is expected, what is ready, what is blocked, who owns the decision, and what must happen next.

Success is demonstrated through stronger on-time delivery, reduced avoidable rework, clearer capacity and portfolio visibility, disciplined readiness gates, effective internal and external production coordination, reliable project data, and a development system that allows Summit K12’s academic experts to spend more time on architecture, learning design, prototypes, quality, and evidence—and less time chasing status or resolving preventable process failures.

Skills, Knowledge and Expertise

Required

• Bachelor’s degree in Project Management, Business, Education, Operations, Publishing, Communications, or a related field.
• Four or more years of project management or production-management experience, preferably in K–12 curriculum, educational publishing, edtech, instructional materials, or another complex content-development environment.
• Demonstrated experience managing multiple concurrent projects with interdependent timelines, stakeholders, deliverables, and review cycles.
• Strong proficiency with project-management systems and tools and the ability to create clear project plans, dashboards, trackers, decision logs, and executive status reporting.
• Experience coordinating cross-functional teams and holding stakeholders accountable to agreed commitments while maintaining strong working relationships.
• Strong understanding of scope, schedule, dependency, risk, change, resource, and workflow management.
• Exceptional organization, attention to detail, written communication, facilitation, follow-through, and ability to create clarity in fast-moving or ambiguous environments.
• Ability to understand curriculum-development workflows well enough to coordinate them effectively while respecting academic decision rights and role boundaries.
• Demonstrated ability to use approved AI and automation tools responsibly to improve project-management efficiency, analysis, documentation, and reporting.

Perferred

• Experience managing K–12 curriculum development, digital learning, assessment, educational publishing, or large-scale instructional-materials production.
• Experience coordinating external content-development partners, contractors, or distributed production teams.
• Experience with structured curriculum-development lifecycles, quality gates, acceptance criteria, editorial/QA workflows, or product-development processes.
• Project management certification such as PMP, CAPM, or comparable training.
• Experience with tools such as Asana, Smartsheet, Monday.com, Jira, Airtable, or similar project and workflow platforms.
• Experience using operational metrics to improve forecasting, cycle time, production quality, capacity planning, or external-partner performance.

Benefits

At Summit K12, we are committed to pay transparency and equitable compensation practices. The posted salary range reflects the scope of the role and current market benchmarks. Final compensation will be based on a variety of factors, including, but not limited to, your experience, skills, and qualifications. All offers are made with consideration for the individual candidate’s background and the needs of the role.

We also offer a comprehensive benefits package. Highlights include:

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance with multiple plan options
• Company-paid short-term disability, long-term disability, and life insurance
• 401(k) retirement plan
• Paid Time Off (PTO) program
• 10 paid holidays plus 1 floating holiday annually
• Wellness resources and support programs

Summit K12 is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to providing equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local laws. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation, and training.