Product Manager

We are seeking a highly motivated, organized, and self-driven Product Manager to join our fully remote team. In this role, you will be responsible for creating product roadmaps based on customer feedback and business initiatives, scoping out desired features and overseeing their development and rollout, and maintaining college data accuracy. As a remote position, the ideal candidate will be someone who thrives in a self-directed work environment and can effectively manage and prioritize tasks independently. You must be resourceful, proactive, adaptable, and able to collaborate efficiently with a distributed team while ensuring high-quality results.

Key Responsibilities:

1. Project Management for Feature Development
   
   • Scope Features: Collaborate with stakeholders (including customer requests, technical constraints, and business opportunities) to define and prioritize new features and improvements.
   • Liaise with Technical Team: Work closely with developers and designers to define clear requirements and ensure that features are built to specification. Test and approve work to meet quality standards before deployment, including conducting software quality assurance (QA) testing. 
   • Release and Updates: Oversee the release of new features, updates, and bug fixes, ensuring smooth deployments and clear communication with internal teams.
   • Customer Communication: Announce feature updates to customers when appropriate, ensuring they are informed about new functionality.
   • Sprint Management: Manage the backlog, maintain the sprint calendar, and organize and moderate key meetings such as sprint planning, retrospectives, and deployment discussions to keep the technical team aligned with feature development goals.
   • Conduct Market Research: Understand the educational consulting industry and the products/tools used by independent educational consultants (IECs) to effectively identify value-adding opportunities.
2. College Data Maintenance and Updates
   • Data Coordination: Take responsibility for the ongoing maintenance and updating of college data, working closely with the technical team to ensure timely and accurate imports. Define and maintain standard internal processes for the retrieval, testing, and release of new data fields and data points. 
   • Data Provider Communication: Act as the primary point of contact for external data providers. Facilitate communications to ensure the integrity and accuracy of the college data.
   • Data Accuracy: Address questions and concerns from both the team and customers regarding the accuracy and updates of college data, ensuring that all inquiries are answered promptly and accurately.
3. Customer Support & Incident Response
   • Customer Support: Provide occasional support for customers, troubleshooting and resolving issues as relates to college data and/or feature development, with a focus on a high level of customer satisfaction. Collaborate with teammates in sales and support to ensure bug fixes and customer requests are promptly resolved alongside ongoing feature development work, customer-facing support articles are updated with the latest information, and customer events/outreach are coordinated with development in mind. 
   • Incident Management: Be prepared to assist in responding to urgent technical incidents affecting the platform, ensuring swift resolution and communication with both internal teams and customers.

How our team works together

Our development team comprises three developers working full-time, and one contracted designer. We assign work to the designer on an as-needed basis, with less complex design tasks handled within our team.

We work in release sprints that typically last 2-3 weeks, depending on team member availability. We use Jira sprints to manage work, but the understanding of what is to be released during any given sprint is loose and fluid. While there is a main release at the end of each sprint, there may also be a number of ad-hoc releases during the sprint as work is completed. Specifications for work items are worked out by product specialists and developers as work is about to begin, and as work proceeds.

We don’t have a dedicated role for project or process management; the product manager is responsible for ensuring that developers have up-to-date information about priority.

Key Skills and Qualifications:

• Experience: 3+ years of experience in product management, project management, or a related field, preferably in a SaaS or technology-driven environment.
• Software QA / Testing: Proven experience in software quality assurance (QA) and testing, with a focus on ensuring features are released bug-free and meet quality standards.
• Data Management: Strong attention to detail and experience managing large datasets or coordinating data updates. Familiarity with MySQL is a plus.
• Technical Acumen: Ability to independently “learn by doing” to understand the many functionalities of a complex SaaS product. Comfortable working with technical teams, understanding product development cycles, and overseeing feature releases. 
• Self-Motivation: Ability to work independently and take initiative without requiring regular direct supervision. You should be comfortable managing your own schedule and setting priorities in a remote work environment.
• Organizational Skills: Exceptional organizational skills with the ability to prioritize and manage multiple tasks efficiently. Strong attention to detail is essential, especially when coordinating complex projects and timelines.
• Communication: Excellent written and verbal communication skills; ability to effectively communicate with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Problem Solving: Ability to troubleshoot issues, think critically, and respond quickly in a fast-paced environment.
• Customer-Centric: A strong focus on ensuring a great customer experience, with the ability to manage customer inquiries related to both technical and data aspects of the platform.