SchooLinks is an ed-tech startup that provides a modern college and career readiness platform that supports districts and students through all aspects of planning for what happens after high school. We offer mission-critical tools used by millions of students around the US to apply to college, plan their coursework, and explore careers.
We're a lean, extremely fast-moving, and highly productive team. We are working to refine and scale our existing features and add others to solidify our advantage in the space. There will be an exciting mix of building new features and improving existing features to work well at scale and account for different variations in user needs.
From a product perspective, we have a unique challenge in building our student-facing products like consumer products. We prioritize ease of use and delight and try to drive organic adoption. On the school district-facing side, we have highly robust workflow tools, analytics, permission management, and configuration that rival modern enterprise tools, even those outside the education space. You will be responsible for both sides of the coin regarding the features you manage.
About the role
SchooLinks is looking for a Product Manager for one of our pods that maintains different parts of our platform. You’ll be responsible for a portfolio of products across the platform. This pod is fully built with engineering managers, engineers, QA, and design. We're looking for a Product Manager who can come in to understand the problem space and continue to iterate in the problem space we're working on, either by extending and iterating on our existing solutions or proposing and building new products.
While we do not differentiate between technical and "regular" product managers, or product owners on our team, our most successful product managers are highly technical and deal with API products and data integrations using education data standards such as OneRoster and Ed-Fi.
Day-to-day responsibilities:
- Project management to enable the team to execute quickly and efficiently, breaking down epics and stories, tracking engineering progress, and ensuring deliverables and timelines are met.
- Suggestion and bug triage from our users and backlog ownership, quickly moving issues through the process and ensuring we resolve issues quickly and clearly communicate back to stakeholders.
- Communicate business needs and requirements to your engineering team to create excitement and buy-in.
- Product vision - figuring out what the pod will invest time in to meet the needs of our student users and staff users and to align that work with the leadership's vision for the growth of the company
- Making tactical calls about how to build specific features and what is worth the investment vs. what is not.
- Own the day-to-day team rituals, including standups, grooming, retro, and handoffs.
- Work with district stakeholders to collect requirements and identify opportunities.
- Release management and release notes, along with maintaining documentation for your modules.
- Communication with other departments about the work your pod is doing: customer success, marketing, and sales
- Support the implementation and sales processes by acting as the SME for your team's products.
- You will not be the QA tester for the pod, but you must own the outcome of the products your team ships.
How you'll know if you will be successful:
- Driving an increase in the utilization rate of your products.
- Positive customer feedback and advocacy to help us grow faster.
- Effectively managing the lifecycle, including making the right decisions on what to build, when to build it, and when it is ready for release.
Your first 30 Days:
You are getting your footing and learning the problem space. You'll work directly with the Director of Product and CTO to get onboarded. Specifically, you will be:
- Learning our workflow and internal processes.
- Learning the products you'll own and how they interact with the rest of the platform.
- Owning story and design ticket creation and tracking (engineering managers will create the dev tasks, but your job is epic creation and user stories).
- Making sure all stakeholders understand requirements and that the requirements are themselves clear.
- We want you to participate and actively bring your intuition, energy, and experience to every interaction.
- Take over production issue/user-suggestion management (we have a separate flow of issues that come from our users and operation team) - your job will be to make sure that these issues are prioritized appropriately and communicated to engineers, and then that upon resolution, the appropriate stakeholders are notified. We have a great relationship with our partner districts so we have a rich supply of user feedback that we can and do act on.
- You thrive on intense, fast-paced teams and want to be pushed and grow personally.
- At least 4 years of overall experience and 2 years of professional product management experience. Compensation and responsibility expectations will depend on your previous experience -- we are open to more experienced candidates if there is a strong fit.
- You have experience in an early-stage startup environment and can navigate uncertainty, but you can also be responsible for products at scale.
- You have experience with technical product delivery, including how data and APIs impact product design.
- You have web app experience and understand the basics of the software development life cycle.
- You can and are willing to roll up your sleeves, perform QA tasks, and look into customer issues.
- You're a good listener and eloquent communicator and feel at home taking on customer-facing conversations to gather information and explain how your product works.
- You're comfortable with project management tools like Jira.
- You don't need to have ed tech experience, but you must be someone who can learn a domain quickly and make the best decisions, sometimes based on limited information, instinct, or principles in the absence of robust data.
- You can track many threads at once, but you have the organization skills to set up and maintain systems to help things flow smoothly without constant intervention to avoid having to keep many things in your head.
- 100% health care coverage
- 401K with matching
- Dental & Vision
- Parental Leave
- Subsidized gym membership
- Annual team offsite
- Unlimited snacks, coffee, tea (in-house only)
SchooLinks is an equal opportunity employer that is committed to diversity and inclusion in the workplace. We prohibit discrimination and harassment of any kind based on race, color, sex, religion, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, genetic information, pregnancy, or any other protected characteristic as outlined by federal, state, or local laws.
