Product Manager

We’re looking for a Senior Product Manager to work alongside our design and engineering teams to bring the most impact to our customers and parents in enrollment. You’ll work with our customers including district administrators, school and city staff, and parents to translate insights into a product that helps families get into education programs while saving time and money. 

• Customer Discovery: Learn, analyze, and understand customer pain points, product usage, and gaps to best represent product direction.
• Product Strategy & Roadmap: Define and own product vision for product areas, prioritize and translate vision into objectives, metrics, and features.
• End to End Feature Ownership: Take features from initial idea through launch. Design complete solutions, iterate and sequence different versions, and cross functionally work with engineering, design, marketing, client services to deliver and market.
• Technical and Go To Market Collaboration: Partner with engineering, design, go to market and client teams to design, deliver, and launch product features. Navigate tradeoffs and timelines across teams and customer deliverables.
• Stakeholder Management and Communication: Communicate proactively priorities, feature solutions, timelines,  and changes while building trust across the organization.

Example Tasks

• Discovery & Research
• Conduct customer interviews to understand unmet pain points
• Complete competitive landscape research to articulate gaps in Avela capabilities compared to competitors
• Synthesize feedback and clearly articulate problem statements to help generate ideas for solutioning

• Write succinct and thorough PRDs that include problem statement, requirements, edge cases, success metrics and acceptance criteria.
• Sequence iterations of features into MVP and subsequent versions that incrementally deliver value
• Assess product tradeoffs and priorities in technical conversations
• Lead regular stakeholder meetings like bug triage and release planning

• Write and maintain succinct and thorough PRDs
• Write release notes and announcements
• Write outward facing product documentation and blog articles

• Listen to customer pain points and feedback and bring perspectives into solutioning
• Participate in troubleshooting and customer support for escalations of critical issues
• Share feature and roadmap updates with customers in a co-creative spirit

Requirements

• You have 5+ years of product management experience, with at least 2 in B2B SAAS
• You can point to specific features or solutions you shipped that moved metrics. 
• You have experience and continued curiosity using AI tools to accelerate research, prototyping, and documentation while still maintaining quality output.
• You’ve worked on small teams where you had to make just enough process to get the job done. 
• You’re good at thinking through entire workflows, future proofing the concept while maintaining a MVP that delivers value. 
• You can think through hard trade offs between MVP, follow on versions and edge cases, especially in an Edtech environment.  
• You can write clearly and explain things simply. You can pivot to talk about technical trade-offs with engineers, problems with customers, and summarize well. Your PRDs are clear enough that someone could start building.
• You can wear multiple hats and shift as priorities change. If there’s a problem, you fix it and don’t wait for someone else to do it. 
• Legal ability to work in the US without visa sponsorship
• Former Edtech or Govtech experience a plus
• Former startup experience a plus
• Travel 10% of the time including conferences and company offsites.
• Located in one of our two hubs: San Francisco and Greater Boston

We’d like to ensure colleagues have an opportunity to connect with each other regularly, and that teams have a few days to work together onsite each month. So we are only hiring candidates for most roles who live within one of our two hubs:

• San Francisco Bay Area - Office Downtown SOMA, San Francisco, CA
• Greater Boston - Office in Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA

Please review the specific job description carefully, as each role might have it’s own unique geographic requirements. For example, some roles might only hire in one hub where the hiring manager is located, and other roles might benefit from geographic distribution and support hiring outside of hubs (e.g. sales).

Outside of our occasional collaboration and social gatherings, we offer a flexible, work-from-home culture. We trust our employees to work from wherever they are most productive and comfortable for most of the time, as long as it is private with high speed internet.  We hope this offers the best of both worlds - the flexibility to work remotely most of the time (far more than a hybrid model), but still the benefits of in-person collaboration and socialization.

Just like we believe in the value of finding the right school for each child, we want to help candidates find the right company. To help you evaluate if Avela is the right fit, we want to be transparent about our evolving company culture and approach to onsite collaboration. You can read more this Community Hub Model and our collaboration norms here. Over time, we expect to spend more time working collaboratively in our hubs.