Senior Product Manager

Senior Product Manager

This is a high-impact role designed for an execution-focused senior product manager who can translate strategic vision into high-performing features. As a Product Manager at Joyful Reading Co., you will own the end-to-end product lifecycle and roadmaps for our flagship offerings: Beanstack and Comics Plus. Reporting to the VP of Product, you will be the driving force ensuring these platforms deliver delightful user experiences, deep engagement, and scalable growth. You'll bring a specific focus to our teacher engagement strategy, and own curriculum-adjacent product judgment across the portfolio.

This role is ideal for a collaborative orchestrator who excels at bridging the gap between strategic business objectives and engineering execution. You will be the driving force behind turning vision into a real roadmap and requirements — directing AI agents to accelerate drafting while owning the judgment behind what gets built and why. You will partner closely with engineers, designers, and product team members to deliver high-quality, reliable releases, and you will collaborate with marketing, sales, success, and business operations to bring new products and features to market that make a real impact for our business and for students.

Key Responsibilities

• Roadmap Strategy & Delivery
• Roadmap Ownership: Own prioritization and roadmap decisions for Beanstack and Comics Plus day to day, in partnership with the VP of Product, translating business goals into a real, sequenced plan that executes on our product vision.
• Functionality Specifications: Translate roadmap decisions and UX designs into clear, functional requirements for engineering. Direct requirements-drafting agents to produce first-pass documents, review them, correct them, and own the final document.
• UX/UI Design Validation: Partner with design to ensure wireframes, prototypes, and user flows align with roadmap decisions and are user validated before engineering handoff.
• Project Ownership: Own initiatives start to finish, including cross-functional alignment with engineering, design, and sales/marketing enablement.
• Teacher Engagement, Curriculum & Recommendation Quality
• Teacher Engagement Strategy: Own the investigation into why teacher engagement lags, and translate findings into concrete roadmap recommendations.
• Curriculum-Adjacent Domain Ownership: Own reading challenge pedagogy and strategic evolution, partnering with the Associate Product Manager, Quality and Support, who owns production, as well as RMI alignment and pedagogical guidance for Book Talks with Benny and related features.
• Product Analytics & Strategic Discovery
• Product & Feature Analytics: Own feature performance monitoring, usage metrics, and product data analysis, ensuring prioritization relies on real behavior rather than intuition.
• Act as primary owner for Pendo feature adoption, including in-app guides.
• Strategic User Discovery: Own primary discovery for Beanstack, Comics Plus, and teacher engagement — the research that shapes the roadmap. Team & Call Intelligence: Gather input directly from the product, sales, and success teams, and mine sales and success call recordings at scale with AI assistance to surface recurring signals that wouldn't show up through interviews alone.
• AI Tooling & Documentation
• AI-Driven Documentation: Own end-to-end creation of release notes, internal enablement guides, and functional documentation for new features. Direct AI documentation agents for first-pass drafts while taking final ownership of accuracy, readability, and launch readiness.
• AI Tooling Management: Maintain the AI agents used across requirements, NPI, and discovery work, including system context and prompt templates, so they stay accurate and scale as scope grows.
• AI Integration & Best Practices: Serve as a lead practitioner in advancing AI adoption and methodologies across the product management function at Joyful Reading Company, proactively testing and evaluating emerging tools and workflows.
• Product Partnership and Mentoring
• QA Strategy & Acceptance: Set the strategy, timeline, and priorities for release testing so development velocity matches our bar for platform stability. The Associate Product Manager, Quality and Support leads day-to-day test execution and bug verification; this role sets the acceptance criteria and is the ultimate arbiter of what's production-ready.
• Delegated Testing Partnership: Partner with the Associate Product Manager, Quality and Support to direct their focus toward the highest-priority testing areas, rather than reviewing everything personally.
• Mentoring: Mentor the Associate Product Manager, Quality and Support on product judgment and craft, reviewing their work, coaching prioritization decisions, and creating stretch opportunities that build toward full PM ownership.

On a Typical Day, You'll Be…

• Reviewing product analytics from multiple sources to catch what's working and what's not, while documenting and sharing insights.
• Making prioritization calls on the Beanstack or Comics Plus roadmap, in partnership with the VP of Product and engineering.
• Directing AI agents to produce first-pass specs, NPI docs, or release notes across several initiatives at once, then reviewing them for accuracy and readiness.
• Partnering with design on prototypes or wireframes for a new feature, with a particular eye toward pedagogical utility, student and teacher engagement, and real-world classroom use.
• Running a strategic discovery interview with a teacher or administrator, shaping next quarter's roadmap rather than just validating this quarter's.
• Participating in standup to unblock engineering dependencies and ensure sprint commitments remain on track.
• Meeting with the Associate Product Manager, Quality & Support to review the month's release schedule, setting the timeline and priorities for upcoming QA cycles.
• Consulting with the Associate Product Manager, Quality & Support to determine whether a newly reported production issue needs to be pulled into the immediate sprint.

Qualifications & Experience

• 4+ years of product management experience, including demonstrated end-to-end ownership of at least one ambiguous, 0-to-1 initiative.
• K-12 education or curriculum background.
• Experience mentoring or developing junior product talent.
• Demonstrated track record of making and owning judgment calls under real ambiguity.
• Excellent written and spoken communication skills.
• Hands-on, daily use of AI tools to accelerate work, with the ability to direct an agent's output and catch what it gets wrong.
• Comfortable holding context and real decision-making across multiple products at once.

Compensation

• We offer a competitive base salary and comprehensive benefits. Leveling is determined based on experience and overall alignment with the role. Base Salary: $100,000 – $140,000
• Other Benefits
• At least 15 vacation days annually in addition to all national holidays and "pager duty" during the week before New Year's Day
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance available
• $1,500 annual professional development stipend
• 401(k) matching

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

We believe diversity breeds innovation. We're building a product that helps librarians, educators, and families everywhere, and to do that well, we need a workforce representative of the population we serve. We are actively looking to add members to our team who will bring diverse backgrounds, new perspectives, and a willingness to challenge us to improve the work we do every day.

From the Heart

At Joyful Reading Company, we live out four core values that reflect the dedication we have for ourselves and our customers. Joy: We make reading fun and accessible. We fuel our work with empathy, kindness, and gratitude to create a lasting impact. Purpose: We advocate for all readers and celebrate unique perspectives. We lead with dedication, persistence, and diligence. Transparency: We balance openness with purpose. We meet challenges with curiosity and exchange feedback as opportunities for growth. Awesomeness: We go beyond "good enough." We take ownership of outcomes, hold one another to high standards, and deliver quality solutions.

If this hits you in the heart and mind, then come work with us.