Product Manager

Company Description

KIPP Public Schools is a national network of public charter schools that prepares students with the skills and confidence to create the future they want for themselves, their communities, and us all. We are a network of 270 schools, nearly 10,000 educators, and more than 160,000 students and alumni.

Our mission: Together with families and communities, we create joyful, academically excellent schools that prepare students with the skills and confidence to pursue the paths they choose—college, career, and beyond—so they can lead fulfilling lives and build a more just world.

Our vision: Every child grows up free to create the future they want for themselves and their communities.

The KIPP Foundation is a nonprofit organization that supports KIPP schools across the country. The KIPP Foundation trains and develops outstanding educators to lead KIPP public schools; provides tools, resources and training for excellent teaching, learning, counseling and advising; promotes innovation; and facilitates the exchange of insights and ideas across KIPP and other public schools and organizations.

KIPP Forward @ KIPP

KIPP Forward as a function focuses on: counseling KIPP students through the lenses of critical consciousness, career aspiration, and student agency to complete postsecondary application, financial aid, and enrollment processes; providing families with essential knowledge and perspectives to prepare students to succeed in their chosen postsecondary education option; advising KIPP alumni as they persist in and complete their postsecondary education option and engage in meaningful career preparation to win a strong first job in an upwardly-mobile career field; staying in touch with alumni, keeping them connected to one another and KIPP’s broad network and resources towards career success, fulfilling lives, and social impact.

KIPP Forward @ KIPP Foundation

The national KIPP Forward team at the KIPP Foundation provides critical training, support, and tools to KIPP Forward regional teams across the country to guide their work supporting KIPP students, families, and alumni on their path to college, career, and beyond. In service of this charge, KIPP Forward’s Product and Innovation team follows equitable design practices to understand user needs and develop innovative technical solutions. We serve as strategic design consultants to program teams, product manage a suite of internal data-insight products and oversee a portfolio of external third-party platforms with students, alumni, counselors, and leaders as users.

The Opportunity

The Product Manager will serve as a key bridge between our Program and Product/technical teams, both within KIPP Foundation and in collaboration with our national network. Accordingly, the Manager should be exceptionally skilled at listening to, engaging with, and learning from users, communicating technical processes and concepts to all staff members, including non-technical program staff. The Foundation has invested in several technology products to support the network’s efforts, including a Salesforce alumni database and Tableau-based dashboards for counselors, advisors, and leaders. The Product Manager will help support those products, as well as serve as product owner for a set of third-party products that we use in our work, such as Overgrad, YouScience and Nepris.

Although this position does not write technical code or develop specific programmatic content, the Product Manager will play a critical role in overseeing and advising on innovative product solutions for KIPP Forward. We seek a results-oriented, user-centered, analytical thinker to contribute to our product-development efforts and continuous improvement learning around the user experience of our products and processes. Additionally, the Product Manager will lead on training practitioners across the network on our products, tools, and technical processes and assist with aspects of product operations.

Reporting to KIPP Forward’s Strategic Design and Product Innovation Director and working closely with the entire KIPP Forward team, the Product Manager will lead existing product maintenance and adoption, support product innovation and analysis, and provide management support to the team. The Manager will also work across departments within the Foundation to design, develop, test, and support new and existing products, including partnering closely with our Technology and Data & Analytics teams.

This is an ideal opportunity for an individual with a relentless drive to deliver results for practitioners, students, and families who is energized by user-centered product development to accelerate the impact of product usage in the world of high school counseling, postsecondary persistence, and career preparation.

Key Responsibilities

Product Management (50%):

• Translate user and program team requirements into business and functional requirements for product features
• Serve as product owner for a suite of third-party partner products, including communication of user needs and desired upgrades, liaising around back-end data access, and ongoing assessment of the health of the product partnerships
• Assist/coordinate research to identify user needs and potential gaps, including conducting interviews, observations, and focus groups with our product users – KIPP Forward staff and leaders across the network
• Analyze user feedback and usage trends to inform strategy and develop requirements for product updates
• Keep a pulse on the market of similar products, including identifying, exploring, and vetting external product and technology opportunities for expanding KIPP Forward support at scale

Product and Process Training (25%):

• Lead and collaborate on creation and refinement of user guides and other training resources for KIPP Forward products (product specifications and process implementation)
• Facilitate and co-facilitate trainings and other PD experiences with network practitioners, with an eye towards multiple learning styles and equitable access to technology success
• Provide customer service and KIPP Forward data-management oversight

Product Operations (15%)

• Identify opportunities to standardize and document processes: scale how we consume and apply knowledge by creating standards to solicit, distill, and distribute user feedback, new use cases, user stories, etc.
• Support user feedback and troubleshooting: help manage user feedback and support inbox, identifying opportunities to scale and share themes with the KIPP Forward Product team and the technical cross-team

Internal Responsibilities (10%)

• Team meetings
• Manager and peer check-ins
• Team and organization engagement and experiences around diversity, equity and inclusion
• Org-wide planning, budgeting and emergent initiatives

Qualifications

Strong emphasis will be placed on the following key education, experience and role-related skills, ideally applied in a fast-paced, dynamic, results-oriented team environment:

• Bachelor’s degree with minimum of five years of relevant experience, preferably in a product management, strategy, design thinking, product development, or project management role that worked with end-users to distill insights for product and/or program strategy
• Experience in product management, development, or design thinking – energy garnered from listening to and learning from stakeholders and ability to rapidly prototype and iterate based on continuous user feedback
• Excellent reporting skills and experience with quantitative analysis
• Willingness to travel up to 25% of time Note: the KIPP Foundation has currently limited travel due to COVID-19.
• Experience with Salesforce development and actionable data visualization is preferred
• Experience with charter or charter-like schools, non-profit strategy, higher education, high school counseling/postsecondary persistence, and/or with first-generation students of color from lower-income backgrounds is preferred
• Ability to model KIPP’s values of Sense of Purpose, Results, Respect, Constant Learning and Humility, and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at all times
• A deep-seated belief that equitable access to and support through postsecondary education towards career success and a fulfilling life is a right for all, rather than for just a privileged few 

Competencies 

• Cultural Competency: value of the diversity of various cultures, identities and races, with the ability to acquire and apply cultural knowledge and adapt to the cultural contexts of the communities in one’s life and work
• Impact and Influence: ability to adapt personal style and approach, build authentic relationships across difference, make a case, anticipate and persuade, motivate action and build coalitions
• Strong strategic-thinking and problem-solving skills: comfort with ambiguity and an ability to break down complex problems
• Excellent critical-thinking skills: ability to synthesize analysis into key takeaways and recommendations
• Robust project- and process-management skills: ability to drive projects from inception to completion while managing multiple projects simultaneously
• Self-directed and impact-oriented: demonstrating initiative and follow-through with a throughline to equitable and excellent practitioner and student results and experience

Location

Remote and/or from our San Francisco, Chicago, New York, or Washington, D.C. offices. This is a full-time, exempt position. 

Compensation and Benefits

KIPP offers competitive salary commensurate with experience. A comprehensive benefits package, generous vacation and PTO, 401k retirement plan with both pre- and post-tax options, as well as gym reimbursement, flexible spending account (FSA), and cell phone reimbursement are also offered.

KIPP Foundation is an equal opportunity employer and an organization that values diversity. People from all diverse backgrounds are strongly encouraged to apply.