Senior Product Manager

The purpose of Zearn

Zearn is the nonprofit educational organization whose mission is to inspire all kids to love learning math. Everything we do is driven by our belief that every kid is a math kid.

Our top-rated learning platform is designed to catch kids up and move them forward in grade-level math. And it works. Large-scale efficacy research shows students who use Zearn make significant gains in math proficiency, including the students who start multiple grade levels behind.

As a nonprofit, all of our work is driven by what is best for kids. At the same time, we operate as an intense and fast-moving technology company, inclusively solving hard problems that will impact current and future generations. The problems we solve require expertise in teaching, learning science, software development, design, video production, and countless other disciplines. As an organization that is always stretching to get to the next level of impact, every single person owns mission critical work.

If you’re ready to join our Team of problem solvers, and own work that will drive us to achieve impact at scale, we are looking for you.

Learn more about us at https://about.zearn.org/.

The purpose of the Senior Product Manager role at Zearn is to partner with product leaders, engineers, designers, and educators to solve complex user problems and translate solutions into delightful experiences for educators. This is achieved by: 

• Empowering innovation through product discovery, leading a team through research, ideation, rapid prototyping, and user-centric iteration to deliver impactful solutions and mitigate go-to-market risks.  

• Leverage data, user feedback, and market research to continually assess the impact of the product roadmap, identify areas of opportunity, prioritize which problems to solve, and quickly iterate to find the most efficient solutions to solve them
• Given a problem, generate ideas for creative approaches to meet user needs 
• Create low fidelity sketches to illustrate your product vision, facilitate early collaboration, and test your thinking
• Partner with design to develop wireframes and interactive prototypes to illustrate new product concepts, gather team and stakeholder input, and validate ideas with users
• Partner with engineering to refine approach, understand technical tradeoffs, and address risks to ensure the product is viable to build
• Anticipate and mitigate potential go-to-market risks throughout the solutioning process
• Managing the end-to-end product development process for multiple projects in parallel
• Ensure the team is consistently focused on the highest priority work for Zearn, and understand how that work contributes to broader Zearn initiatives and mission
• Translate user needs into detailed product requirements, specifications, and timelines
• Partner with design to develop wires into intuitive, accessible, brand-aligned products
• Work to quickly clear design and development roadblocks as they arise, thoroughly addressing every edge case of the user experience
• Ensure features are delivered on time and function as desired, elevating particularly complex or risky changes to other areas of the product
• Ensure product launches are followed by quick, data-driven iteration cycles
• Developing deep cross functional relationships to understand internal dependencies, anticipate and clear execution risks, and prepare teams for launch
• Deeply understand team workflows in order to anticipate what and when each team needs to know about upcoming product changes
• Effectively tailor communications so that each team has a clear understanding of features and timelines at the appropriate level of detail for their work
• Prepare necessary go-to-market collateral for each team

Problems someone in this role can be expected to tackle:

• How can Zearn’s reporting suite support District and School leaders in implementing Zearn?
• How can Zearn create a seamless onboarding experience for educators (teachers, school leaders, district leaders) and families when they sign in to Zearn for the first time? 
• How can Zearn increase educator engagement with the platform in order to drive impact?
• What is Zearn’s strategy for individual or school-level account management and communications as enterprise buyers (e.g. large districts, state education agencies) change purchasing policies? 
• How can new technologies, such as generative AI, enable Zearn to drive impact at scale? 
• How do we continuously improve our team processes and tools and strengthen cross-f