Product Manager
Over the last 9 years, Ellevation Education has built a thriving business serving the administrators, teachers, and specialists who support English Learners at public schools across the US. Today, over 1,000 school districts use our software to manage their EL programs. We are a successful, rapidly growing business with a real mission -- helping English Learners achieve their highest aspirations.
We are currently making a series of major investments in our flagship product. As part of that, we're setting up a new team focused on enabling EL admins to effectively manage the various people who work together to support students: principals, specialists, teachers and, in particular, parents -- a group this new team would allow us to bring onto the platform.
We believe adding parents to our platform will both powerfully serve our mission by helping school districts and parents better work together, while also allowing us to grow our business by meeting a clear market desire for such capabilities.
As the Product Manager for this new ingestion team, you will play a key role in opening up this growth opportunity. You will partner closely with an engineering peer to lead the agile team, identify and weigh tradeoffs around short and long-term investments, and drive an experimental and iterative approach to solving key problems.
At Ellevation, Product Managers are responsible for working cross-functionally across the organization to ensure the work of your team has an impact on our customers. This involves creating opportunities for others to plug in to your work and ensuring stakeholders understand what you are doing, why you are doing it, and that you have factored their ideas and/or concerns into that thinking.
Product Culture
We are organized into small product teams that focus on key problems to solve in the context of their specific domain. We focus on outcomes over output. Our teams are empowered to research, prototype, and solicit user feedback to validate hypotheses. We engage users early and rapidly iterate so that the end result is a high-confidence, high-value product. We aim to foster an environment where we have the runway to experiment and learn from failure while tackling tricky challenges.
Our teams are cross-functional in that they are made up of members of Product (Product Manager, UX Designer) and members of Engineering (Tech Lead, Engineers). Product and Engineering work hand-in-hand together -- we call ourselves DevPro and in fact rarely meet in isolation.
Clear vision and strong strategy are core principles within the Product organization. We value product managers who fully own the long-term vision -- knowing where we are going and importantly why it matters for our customers. As strategy is meant to evolve, you will need to constantly identify increments, spot and mitigate risks, and position your team to meet the needs of the business on the way there.
We also celebrate being accountable to outcomes which means signing up to pursue that vision by knocking down obstacles that get in the way. This looks like conducting experiments which throw off learnings, adjusting strategy based on those learnings, and of course delivering products to end-users that change behavior and drive real value for the business.
Impact:
- 1 month - Build a clear picture of the key challenges and strategic contexts facing Ellevation with a particular eye on the Flagship Product and related teams. Establish high-trust relationships with members of this new team.
- 3 months - Begin to shape and drive strategic decisions around the user management domain. Work alongside engineering and design leaders to set ambitious objectives and key results for the team. Conduct discovery and validate high-impact product solutions. Develop rapport with other product managers and stakeholders.
- 6 months - Work with R&D Leadership to define a Product Strategy for user management that positions Ellevation to take advantage of potential growth opportunities around parents. Develop rapport with members of leadership and a wider set of stakeholders.
- 12 months - Partner with engineering and design leaders to drive key outcomes against our business goals of expanding the audience that we serve and increasing the complexity of problems that we solve. Ensure our user management tools puts Ellevation in a position to build towards 30%+ growth in 2022 and 2023.
About You:
- You have 3+ years of Product Management experience
- You have a strong track record of solving complex problems and driving key business outcomes
- You are a natural leader and are able to inspire and influence others without authority
- You are experimental and curious; you love to test ideas, learn quickly, fail fast, and iterate
- You demonstrate an eagerness to learn from others
About Us:
At Ellevation, we develop world-class software to help school districts and educators support the fastest growing population of K-12 students: English Language Learners (ELLs). Ellevation helps school districts transform their EL programs and ensure all students can achieve their highest aspirations with a best-in-class data and instructional planning platform, resources to build teacher capacity, and student-facing programs to teach academic language.
We are a fast-growing, mission-driven technology company, partnering with over 800 public school districts all across the country. We are well-capitalized, have a strong team, and are continuously focused on how to build the best organization so that we can achieve our ambitious social and financial objectives.
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 (We are currently working 100% remotely due to COVID-19)
+ 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 to support all levels of athleticism
+ Opportunity to join an open and collaborative work environment!
Learn more about our team in our Culture Deck.
Here at Ellevation, we champion diversity, inclusion, equity, and belonging. We strive to build a team that reflects the diverse communities we serve. We’re an equal opportunity employer, committed to creating an inclusive workplace that promotes and values a range of ideas and opinions. We embrace all types of differences in the development of our organization. We are proud to have been recognized in prior years as “Best Tech Workplace for Diversity” from the Timmy Awards for investing in trainings around inclusive behaviors, microaggressions, unconscious bias, and fostering a culture of sharing educational resources across the company. We are encouraged by our progress, but there’s more work to be done.