Product Manager – Contractor (1099)

What we're looking for:

Working closely with the Sr. Manager, Product, the Product Manager will be accountable for a roadmap of capabilities that will help InStride scale innovative workforce education solutions across all of our users: corporate partners, academic partners, working adult learners, and internal teams. The ideal candidate will be able to seamlessly collaborate across product lines and partners and is passionate about building solutions to help our business grow. The role requires a combination of strategic problem solving, analytical prowess, and cross-functional leadership.

As the role will likely focus on technical product pods, this Product Manager must be comfortable operating deeply in technical problem spaces – partnering closely with engineering to drive platform, architecture, and internal tooling initiatives – while translating that work into durable business and user outcomes.

Skills we’d love to see you show off:

• Translating: Ability to translate complex market and business needs into clear product requirements.
• Technical Product Leadership: Comfort leading highly technical initiatives such as platform enhancements, internal tools, system integrations, and architectural or framework migrations; able to engage engineers in detailed discussions and understand tradeoffs.
• Systems Thinking: Ability to reason about complex systems, dependencies, data flows, and long-term scalability when defining product direction.
• Data-driven Decision Making: Strong analytical skills and inclination to use data (or proxy data) to inform decisions and prioritization
• Clear, Tailored Communication: Strong verbal and written communication across a diverse set of partners and team members; writes clearly, succinctly, and in a compelling manner
• Relationship Management: Able to build rapport and trust across stakeholder groups; strong listener who displays emotional intelligence
• Cross-functional Leadership: Experience partnering cross-functionally to effectively ask questions, listen, uncover perspectives, present options, build consensus, and effectuate new ideas; Proven experience working closely with engineering teams to shape solutions, sequence work, and balance technical health with business outcomes.
• Planning and Execution: Designs strong project plans, effectively mobilizes colleagues across teams, and ensures the work is completed on time and to a high standard

Who you are:

• 5+ years of product management or similar experience, preferably in edtech or HR tech
• Bachelor’s degree or relevant work experience
• Experience with agile software development practices and experience crafting epics, user stories, building agile processes, backlog management, and roadmap planning
• Experience leading or significantly contributing to platform, infrastructure-adjacent, or internal product initiatives (e.g., APIs, internal tools, system integrations, migrations).
• Comfortable context-switching between deeply technical problem spaces and customer- or partner-facing feature development.
• Experience leading technical conversations with less technical internal and external stakeholders (e.g., corporate and/or higher education leaders)
• Understands the value of strong documentation, knowledge management, and impact measurement
• Enjoys tackling open-ended, ambiguous problems and delving into new topics, domains, and techniques; can process a large amount of information and distill into recommendations
• "No job too small" attitude / “roll up sleeves” mentality; proactive with a bias for speed and action; able to handle multiple, competing (and sometimes unexpected) demands

How you will create impact:

Product development and execution

• Lead end-to-end product lifecycle from discovery through launch, ensuring timely execution and high-quality delivery
• Accountable for a roadmap of features and capabilities to ensure a scalable and high-quality experience for learners and/or corporate partners
• Lead product work for pods focused on technical initiatives, including internal support tools, partner eligibility management, core platform/API evolution, and front-end framework migration.
• Partner closely with engineering to define scope, sequence work, manage dependencies, and make informed tradeoffs that balance delivery, scalability, and technical quality.
• Ensure technical initiatives are clearly tied to business outcomes, operational efficiency, or future product capabilities.
• Lead partnership with other departments to ensure proper triage, review and prioritization of feature and/or bug requests from internal and external stakeholders
• Define, track, and report on key product metrics; leverage data analytics and user research to guide decisions and to continuously improve product performance and user experience
• Support exploration and go-to-market of new business solutions and features in collaboration with other teams, including representing the product team in strategic partnership conversations

Understanding of the market and business

• Maintain a solid understanding of the problems and needs of working adult learners and employer partners, by proactively reviewing and analyzing available market data and internal data (e.g., A/B testing, learner survey data, platform usage data) and seeking opportunities to obtain firsthand learnings (e.g., watch Gong recordings of sales calls, join/lead user experience interviews)
• Translate market and business needs into product solutions and features

The benefits listed within this career page are for full-time positions only and may not apply to this job posting.