Product Manager
At Ellevation, we develop world-class software to help school districts and educators support the fastest growing population of K-12 students: English Learners (ELs). By combining great products, student data, and research on best practices, Ellevation helps school districts transform their EL programs and ensure all students can achieve their highest aspirations.
We are a fast-growing, mission-driven technology company, partnering with nearly 600 public school districts all across the country. We are well-capitalized, have a strong and growing team, and are continuously focused on how to build the best organization so that we can achieve our ambitious social and financial objectives.
This is where you come in…
With an increasing number of small, agile product teams, Ellevation has a need for a Product Manager to lead the efforts around discovery, validation, definition, and release of products and features that help Ellevation meet its goals. Through your work and deep understanding of the customer, you will advocate for solutions that address customer challenges in a way that has the widest impact across our user base, and expands our market while reducing internal inefficiencies. You will devise, validate, and shepherd through development solutions that customers didn't know where possible. By providing a more intuitive solution that leverages technology, than customers would propose on their own, the product will prove valuable and indispensable to the customer.
You Will:
- Lead the product team’s discovery and definition process, with direct impact on - and accountability to - quarterly OKRs. Discovery sprints, user and usage research, mockups, and user validation testing are all expected as part of product feature development.
- Work closely and daily with engineers to divide and sequence work into milestones, write user stories to define the work, and provide ongoing definition and iterative adjustments with engineers as needed.
- Oversee the product team’s Agile process. Manage, curate, and prioritize project and defect backlogs. Attend - and often lead - daily standups. Facilitate sprint planning. Lead sprint presentations to internal stakeholders.
- Own and be accountable to product metrics for your team. Ensure that feature work is informed by usage and market data. Set aggressive usage and engagement metrics tied to company OKRs. Own the reporting of metrics post-launch and ensure they are used to inform future enhancements.
- Evangelize internally and externally. Ensure internal teams are informed of your team’s work, and understand - completely - the value it provides to customers. Provide use cases, validation data, and reference customers to Marketing.
About You:
- Product Manager: Prior experience as a product manager in either a B2B, B2G, or EdTech SaaS company. Alternatively, experience working closely with a product organization in a similar company. Ability to understand web application usage and engagement data. Experience with statistics and reporting a plus.
Communication: Extremely strong communicator. Must be able to speak with (and write for) technical audiences, non-technical users across multiple personas, and business stakeholders. Strong ability to listen to multiple sources of information, find commonalities, and synthesize multiple solutions. Problem-solving, and a willingness to be proven wrong (and prove others wrong) is a must.
Technical Background: Proficiency with data sets and data models. Understand how data is stored, sorted, filtered, and visualized. Proficiency with mockup/prototyping tools (ie: Balsamiq, Sketch, InVision, OmniGraffle). Experience with project management software (Jira, Fogbugz, Prodpad, Trello, etc). Strong ability to make decisions based on evidence, explain them to others, and be held accountable to their decisions.
- Interpersonal Skills: Knowing the strings to pull, the buttons to push, and when to say yes or no, in order to get work effectively with different personality types. Ability to actively listen to customers with low technical knowledge, and sympathize with challenges while still ensuring important input is gathered in inform product design. Ability to juggle multiple priorities from others: handling multiple requests with ease, keeping a cool head, updating those who need to know, and facilitating effective group conversations
- Leader: Ability to “manage up” and garner buy in and advocacy from stakeholders among company leadership.
Why Ellevation?
In addition to our great benefit plans and competitive salaries, here are some other perks that make us unique:
- Great location in Boston - a stone’s throw from the Chauncy Street/Downtown Crossing T stop
- Ability to make a significant impact in the education industry
- Fun Fridays including virtual happy hours with our remote team
- Free snacks, beverages, fruit, and we even compost!
- On-site gym, game room and darts with cork boards behind them to support all levels of athleticism
- Opportunity to join an open and collaborative work environment!