Product Manager

The position

Looking for a Product Manager to maintain product priorities and support development across our established products and our new platform. The Product Manager works with engineering, customer support and the school districts that use our software, and prepares the information leadership uses to decide what is built, when it is built and how it is delivered. The position reports to the VP of Engineering, who leads sprint planning. The Product Manager maintains the product backlog, prepares backlog items for planning and supports the team's delivery process.

Responsibilities

• Maintain the product backlog. Keep a single, prioritized backlog across our products so that engineering, support, sales and leadership share the same view of priorities and upcoming work.
• Recommend priorities and support escalations. Assess competing requests and customer issues, weighing engineering effort and technical risk against customer needs and business objectives, and recommend priorities to the VP of Engineering.
• Write requirements and acceptance criteria. Turn product needs into clear backlog items with acceptance criteria that engineering can build from. Check completed work against those criteria before release.
• Support the sprint process. Prepare backlog items for two-week sprint planning, which is led by the VP of Engineering, and take part in sprint reviews and retrospectives. Keep project boards accurate and track progress.
• Maintain the release calendar. Plan release timing around the school year, including testing windows, staff evaluation cycles, report-card periods and back-to-school activities.
• Support the roadmap and platform transition. Help plan the move of our established products to the new platform, including product sequencing, district onboarding, pilot programs and communication with district staff.
• Prepare custom requests for review. For district requests, prepare an assessment for leadership review covering feasibility, whether the request applies to other districts, cost and timing, and recommend whether to address it through configuration, custom development or a core product change. Identify needs that recur across districts.
• Work with districts. Maintain contact with assessment coordinators, administrators, evaluation leaders and HR staff. Collect feedback, write release notes and bring customer input into backlog priorities.

Qualifications

• Three or more years as a Product Manager or Product Owner, maintaining a backlog that a development team worked from sprint to sprint.
• Experience writing acceptance criteria that engineers could build from without further clarification.
• Experience taking part in sprint planning, reviews and retrospectives, and helping to improve them.
• Experience with a product that has many existing customers, not only new product development.
• Experience planning releases and communicating them to non-technical customers.
• Ability to decline or defer a request and explain the trade-off.
• Experience with an issue tracker (such as JIRA) and a helpdesk system, and the ability to write clearly and plainly.

Preferred qualifications

• K-12 education technology experience: assessment, staff evaluation (APPR), student information systems or report cards.
• Knowledge of FERPA and New York Education Law 2-d, or experience with software that holds student or staff records.
• Experience modernizing a long-lived product, or moving customers from an older product to a new one.
• Experience working with a development team that uses AI-assisted tools.