Product Manager

Travel: Limited (1-2 trips per year)

Application Deadline: Priority application deadline: Sunday, November 8, 2026, at 11:59 p.m. ET. Applications received after this date may be considered on a rolling basis.

THE ORGANIZATION

Founded at the University of Michigan Medical School, TRAILS ( Transforming Research into Action to Improve the Lives of Students) is among the most innovative and rapidly growing school-based mental health solutions in the country.

Young people today are growing up in an increasingly complex world. Rates of loneliness, hopelessness, depression, and anxiety are soaring. To help them develop into healthy, productive adults, we must equip our youth with effective strategies to maintain mental wellness amid complexity and uncertainty. Research has identified evidence-based practices that are simple to learn and highly effective—supporting everyday wellness and addressing challenges as they arise. TRAILS provides a critical missing link: ensuring that the adults in our K-12 schools are fluent in these best practices and have the tools to teach them.

At TRAILS, we believe every adult in a school plays a role in supporting student mental health. That’s why we provide a digital platform with role-specific learning pathways for all staff, building a community of support that can meet every student's needs. To date, TRAILS has brought essential skills and resources to more than 14,000 teachers, administrators, and school mental health professionals.

As we work to respond to demand for TRAILS programming from schools and districts throughout the United States, our team is guided by a core commitment to equity: The TRAILS growth strategy identifies Title I designated schools as our broadest target population, and we aim specifically to impact students who experience high risk for poor mental health outcomes and disproportionate barriers to quality care. As we grow our team, we seek candidates who share our commitment to equity in health and healthcare access, who practice cultural humility, and who thrive in and contribute to an inclusive working environment.

THE ROLE

The Product Manager leads day-to-day product development and delivery, while coordinating cross-functional processes that connect program development with the digital platform. They champion the user experience, making sure every product decision reflects how our users work. The role is responsible for prioritizing product improvements, translating user needs into actionable requirements, driving delivery across UX and engineering, aligning program and product work, and managing the operational workflow for contracted content development and platform readiness.

The Product Manager is responsible for ensuring:

1. Product delivery: Valuable product improvements are prioritized, developed, and released efficiently.
2. Program–product alignment: Shared priorities, timelines, and dependencies are coordinated, reducing delays and surprises.
3. Content-to-platform execution: Content moves reliably from development through review, design, implementation, and publication.

The Product Manager reports to the Head of Program & Product and works closely with the UX designer, lead engineer, program colleagues, and external contractors to ensure that product and program deliverables are coordinated, high-quality, and delivered on schedule.

The role has no direct reports but requires strong leadership through influence, independent decision-making, and accountability for outcomes.

RESPONSIBILITIES

Product Development (50%)

• Translate program and product needs into a prioritized roadmap and actionable backlog, incorporating user needs, engineering estimates, technical risks, dependencies, and available capacity.
• Lead product development from requirements through UX design, engineering, testing, and release, ensuring that solutions address identified user needs and deliver meaningful value.
• Maintain documentation related to product requirements and user experience standards.
• Develop user stories, and acceptance criteria in collaboration with UX, engineering, and program stakeholders.
• Ensure that product decisions, priorities, and their rationale are communicated clearly to relevant stakeholders.
• Balance new development with maintenance, technical debt, and ongoing product quality.
• Gather and synthesize feedback from TRAILS staff, partner organizations (i.e. schools and districts), and end users to identify opportunities and inform product priorities.
• Monitor product usage, quality, and delivery metrics; report on performance regularly and use findings to inform product decisions and continuous improvement.

Prioritization & Delivery (45%)

• Work with the Head of Program & Product to forecast upcoming work, identify capacity constraints, and balance competing priorities across initiatives.
• Make day-to-day prioritization and scope decisions within agreed product priorities; identify significant trade-offs, risks, and proposed roadmap changes early, with clear recommendations for the Head of Program & Product.
• Coordinate planning and delivery across product, program, UX, engineering, and external contributors, ensuring that priorities, timelines, dependencies, and resource constraints are visible and aligned.
• Coordinate content development and design with program and product priorities, platform requirements, and release schedules.
• Lead backlog refinement and sprint planning to set realistic commitments and keep priorities, capacity, and delivery timelines aligned.
• Develop and refine repeatable workflows, standards, and handoff processes that improve the efficiency, quality, and predictability of content production and publication.
• Track content deliverables and dependencies, proactively addressing delays, incomplete work, and quality issues that could affect implementation or release.
• Maintain clear visibility into project status, outstanding decisions, risks, and blockers; proactively resolve issues or escalate them with recommendations.
• Coordinate launches and other initiatives that require integrated program and product delivery, ensuring that all necessary workstreams are ready for release.
• Establish and improve lightweight planning, tracking, and communication processes that support predictable delivery without creating unnecessary overhead.
• Coordinate the end-to-end workflow for delivering program content to the platform, from initial planning through content development, review, design, implementation, and publication.

Team responsibilities (5%)

• Attend all staff meetings and retreats, and other relevant TRAILS meetings as necessary
• Support TRAILS team with all-hands-on deck-events as needed and other team initiatives

THE PERSON

Our experience suggests that 5+ years of the following types of professional experiences lend themselves to this work:

• Management of the development and delivery of digital products, from identifying user needs and defining requirements through design, development, testing, and release.
• Coordination of complex, cross-functional projects involving product, design, engineering, program, and other stakeholders.
• Management of interdependent workflows and deliverables, including coordinating external contractors, managing timelines, and ensuring work products meet agreed requirements.
• Coordination of content development and production, ideally involving multiple contributors, review and approval processes, and delivery through a digital platform.
• Use of iterative development processes to prioritize work, manage competing demands, and deliver improvements within resource and timeline constraints.
• Application of user feedback, product data, and performance measures to inform decisions and improve products or processes.
• Collaboration across teams and functions, including leading initiatives through influence rather than direct reporting relationships.

Our experience suggests that the following types of skills lend themselves well to this work:

• Product judgment and prioritization: Ability to assess competing needs, weigh user value against effort and constraints, make informed trade-offs, and recommend clear priorities.
• Project and workflow management: Ability to translate goals into actionable plans, establish clear ownership and timelines, manage dependencies, and keep complex work moving.
• Cross-functional leadership: Ability to build alignment, facilitate decisions, resolve competing perspectives, and drive progress without relying on formal authority.
• Product requirements and problem definition: Ability to identify underlying user problems and translate them into clear requirements, user stories, and acceptance criteria.
• Operational process design: Ability to establish and improve practical workflows for coordinating contributors, managing deliverables, and moving work efficiently from development through implementation and release.
• Communication and stakeholder management: Ability to communicate priorities, decisions, expectations, risks, and changes clearly to technical and nontechnical audiences.
• Analytical thinking and continuous improvement: Ability to use data, feedback, and delivery metrics to evaluate results, identify bottlenecks, and improve product and operational processes.
• Adaptability and sound judgment: Ability to navigate ambiguity, make timely decisions with incomplete information, and recognize when to resolve an issue independently versus when to seek input or escalate.

COMPENSATION

The salary range for this role is $127,155 - $134,219.

TRAILS is a fully remote organization offering a comprehensive benefits package, including medical, dental, and vision coverage; a 401(k) retirement plan with an employer match of up to 5%; short and long-term disability coverage; flexible time off; and a generous paid holiday schedule.

OUR COMMITMENT TO DIVERSITY, EQUITY, & INCLUSION

Addressing inequities in access to evidence-based mental health care is intrinsic to the TRAILS mission. The intentionality behind this approach is woven into everything we do at TRAILS, resulting in a staff-wide commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion for all facets of our program. If this commitment is something to which you could positively contribute, we encourage you to apply, particularly if your voice represents a historically excluded perspective.

TRAILS is an “at-will” and equal opportunity employer. Applicants and employees shall not be discriminated against because of race, religion, sex, national origin, ethnicity, age, mental or physical disability, sexual orientation, gender (including pregnancy and gender expression) identity, color, marital status, veteran status, medical condition, or any other classification protected by federal, state, or local law or ordinance.

APPLICATION NOTES

• We are only considering applicants who are legally authorized to work in the United States.
• Our job descriptions reflect TRAILS’ assignment of essential functions and qualifications of the role. Nothing herein restricts management's right to assign, reassign or eliminate duties and responsibilities to this role at any time.
• Please note that TRAILS employees may be required to undergo a background check. Findings do not automatically exclude candidates from the hiring process, but will be taken into consideration.