Amazing World-Class Product Manager

PRODUCT MANAGER ABOUT US We are an interview and career readiness platform used by universities, workforce agencies, nonprofits, and other organizations. We combine expert-led curriculum with AI-powered tools to help people build stronger resumes, practice interviews, navigate the job search, and get hired faster. Our products include serve both individual job seekers and the organizations that support them. THE ROLE We’re hiring a hands-on Product Manager who can make sure we build the right things, for the right reasons, in the right order. This is a highly proactive role. You won’t wait for a roadmap, a feature request, or perfectly defined requirements. You’ll talk directly with customers, work closely with Customer Success and Sales, study how people use the product, research competitors and emerging technologies, identify problems worth solving, and bring opportunities forward. You’ll own the “what” and the “why” of product development. You’ll turn messy inputs into clear problem definitions and priorities, then work closely with design and engineering to determine the best solution. This is not a project management role. Engineering owns technical execution, sprint management, timelines, and delivery. Your job is to make sure the team understands the customer problem, business context, priorities, constraints, and what success should look like. WHAT YOU’LL DO ‐ Lead product discovery: Talk directly with customers and users, work closely with Customer Success and Sales, review product usage and drop-off points, and identify recurring problems worth solving. ‐ Understand the problem behind the request: Customers may ask for a specific feature. Your job is to understand why they want it, what problem they are trying to solve, and whether there is a better or simpler solution. ‐ Conduct proactive research: Study competitors, adjacent products, customer workflows, SaaS best practices, AI capabilities, market trends, and emerging technologies that could improve our products. ‐ Own product prioritization: Maintain a focused set of the most important problems we should solve and connect each one to a meaningful business outcome such as activation, engagement, retention, expansion, customer value, or an important deal requirement. ‐ Say no when necessary: Help protect the team from becoming a feature factory or building whatever was requested most recently or most loudly. ‐ Define problems clearly: Create short, useful product briefs that explain what problem we are solving, who has it, why it matters, what success looks like, important constraints, and what is out of scope. ‐ Partner closely with design: Give designers the customer context and product clarity they need, review flows and prototypes, challenge unnecessary complexity, and help the team arrive at simple, intuitive experiences. ‐ Partner closely with engineering: Bring clear problems and constraints, collaborate on possible approaches and tradeoffs, answer questions as work progresses, and make product decisions when new information emerges. ‐ Respect technical ownership: Work closely with engineering without prescribing technical solutions. Engineering owns architecture, implementation decisions, sprint execution, timelines, and delivery. ‐ Drive simplicity: Constantly ask whether something is necessary, whether steps can be removed, whether two workflows can become one, and whether there is a simpler way to solve the same problem. ‐ Make smart scope decisions: Help the team determine what needs to be included now, what can wait, and what we can learn without overbuilding. ‐ Stay involved through development: Product ownership does not end when a brief is written. Stay available throughout design and development to clarify intent, resolve product questions, make tradeoffs, and protect the original customer outcome. ‐ Validate what we ship: After launch, determine whether customers are actually adopting what we built and whether it improved the behavior or business metric we intended to influence. ‐ Feed results back into discovery: Use product data, customer feedback, and observed behavior to determine what worked, what didn’t, and what we should learn or improve next. ‐ Keep stakeholders aligned: Make it easy for leadership, Customer Success, Sales, Design, and Engineering to understand what we are building, why it matters, what we are not building, and what our priorities are. ‐ Be proactive and vocal: Surface customer problems, product opportunities, UX friction, competitive threats, technical constraints, and emerging ideas rather than waiting for someone else to identify them. WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR ‐ 4-8+ years of product management experience building SaaS, consumer, or digital products. ‐ Experience working in a startup, smaller SaaS company, or similarly fast-moving environment where Product Managers are expected to be highly hands-on. ‐ Strong customer discovery skills. You are comfortable interviewing users, asking good follow-up questions, identifying patterns, and separating underlying problems from requested solutions. ‐ Strong product judgment. You can take ambiguous information and determine what deserves attention, what needs more research, what should be simplified, and what should not be built. ‐ Excellent ability to synthesize information from customers, usage data, internal teams, market research, and business priorities into clear product decisions. ‐ Strong prioritization instincts. You are comfortable choosing a small number of important problems rather than maintaining an enormous roadmap or backlog. ‐ Excellent written communication. You can explain a product problem clearly enough that design, engineering, and business stakeholders understand what we are trying to accomplish and why. ‐ Comfort working closely with product designers on user flows, prototypes, usability, and experience decisions. ‐ Comfort working closely with engineers and discussing APIs, data, integrations, technical constraints, edge cases, and implementation tradeoffs without needing to dictate how the system should be built. ‐ Analytical instincts. You are comfortable looking at product usage, funnels, adoption, engagement, and other signals to understand what users are actually doing. ‐ Strong business judgment. You understand that product decisions should ultimately connect to customer value and outcomes such as activation, engagement, retention, expansion, revenue, or strategic differentiation. ‐ High ownership and accountability. You care about whether the product actually worked, not simply whether it shipped. ‐ Low ego and intellectual curiosity. You can advocate strongly for an idea, listen to contrary evidence, and change your mind when the facts change. BONUS POINTS ‐ Experience building AI-powered products, conversational experiences, personalization, recommendations, scoring, feedback systems, or other AI-driven workflows. ‐ Experience with B2B2C SaaS where an institution or organization purchases the product but individual users drive adoption and engagement. ‐ Experience in EdTech, workforce development, HR technology, recruiting, career services, or job search products. ‐ Experience building products for universities, government agencies, enterprise customers, or other organizations with multiple stakeholder types. ‐ Experience with product analytics, user research tools, experimentation, and lightweight prototyping. ‐ Enough technical fluency to have productive conversations about APIs, integrations, data models, AI systems, and technical tradeoffs. WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE ‐ The company has a clear, focused set of product priorities rather than a long list of disconnected feature requests. ‐ Customer problems are consistently discovered and understood before solutions are designed. ‐ Product decisions clearly connect to customer value and business outcomes. ‐ Design and engineering understand why they are building something, not simply what they have been asked to build. ‐ Customers and internal teams feel heard even when their specific feature request is not prioritized. ‐ We make better decisions about what not to build. ‐ Product experiences become simpler and more intentional rather than accumulating unnecessary complexity. ‐ Engineering spends less time building things that later need to be rethought because the original problem was poorly defined. ‐ After something launches, we can answer whether customers adopted it and whether it actually worked. ‐ Leadership can easily understand what we are building this quarter, why those priorities were selected, and what outcomes we expect them to produce.