As the Product Manager, you are someone who believes in the power of online platforms to strengthen engagement across a network at scale, and in a way that enables Teach For America to live into our collective vision of educational equity. You are passionate about technology as an empowering lever for engagement, and obsess over data and insights to learn from users and ensure we meet their needs.
You are responsible for developing a strong vision and strategy for attracting and engaging users across audiences to/on TFA Connect BETA, Teach For America’s enterprise social network for corps members, alumni, staff and partners. You are also responsible for ensuring that we’re consistently capturing, analyzing, sharing, and acting on user data, and monitoring our progress against our platform KPIs and broader key results. You then determine how best to optimize the platform to ensure that users regularly leverage it for connecting to people, opportunities and resources across the TFA network, partnering closely with our IT team to define and implement product-related enhancements. Throughout all of your responsibilities, you maintain a consistent user-first orientation, ensuring that we’re identifying and driving value to alumni and corps members who are on TFA Connect BETA.
This is highly visible, interconnected, interdependent work that will involve close collaboration with staff across the organization, especially our Marketing & Communications Team (MCT). You must align the overarching vision and strategy for TFA Connect BETA user adoption and engagement with broader organizational strategies, particularly our networking and opportunities programmatic strategies and Project Polaris, TFA’s ongoing effort to create a new, user-first digital ecosystem. Additionally, your orientation and approach to this work must align with our vision for deeply supporting and partnering with regions and fellow national teams.
Product Strategy/Leadership (40%)
- Develop and execute on the vision and strategy for attracting and engaging users to/on TFA Connect BETA -- in close collaboration with staff across the project team and broader organization, and in a way that reflects your user-first orientation.
- Develop and execute a product management process that ensures stakeholder input and involvement -- in design and prototyping, and in feature development and maintenance of the platform.
Data Insights & Analysis (25%)
- Assess key needs and desires of audience groups (i.e. alumni, corps members, staff and partners) and design user-friendly resources to share these findings.
- Develop and optimize a data-driven engagement model, launching tactics across various marketing levers to drive platform usage and adoption.
- Closely monitor and keep our team and partners (including regions) informed of and invested in our progress against platform KPIs and broader key results.
- Contribute to a culture of continuous learning and improvement by:
- ensuring user data and insights are actionable
- defining objectives and tracking results to inform user engagement tactics and adoption targets
- codifying and sharing key learnings with project stakeholders
Partnerships & Collaboration (25%)
- Partner with TFA Connect BETA project leadership, fellow Collective Leadership & Engagement (CLE) teammates, regions, and MCT and IT partners to create a feedback loop, where user engagement insights are helping to influence the platform roadmap and programmatic strategies.
- Build strategic relationships across the organization, including with (but not limited to):
- Regional partners, CLE and MCT to drive overall adoption and usage of TFA Connect BETA
- MCT to ensure alignment with Project Polaris
- IT to drive product decisions that lead to stronger user experience and outcomes
- CLE to optimize resources and support for regional and national partners and deepen regional integration of TFA Connect BETA
- Alumni and corps member-facing teams to ensure strong user adoption and engagement, especially among second-year corps members, alumni teachers, school leaders and social entrepreneurs.
- Collaborate and share best practices and lessons learned among fellow product managers.
Team & Organization Contributions (10%)
- Support org-wide initiatives and positively contribute to team culture.
- Participate in the corps member interview selection process.
- Attend professional development conferences and learning group experiences.
- Steward organizational priorities, core values, Foundations, and breakthrough results.
- Demonstrate a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusiveness.
Product Strategy / Leadership:
- Setting vision and strategy for and managing projects
- Driving and optimizing platform adoption and engagement
- Leveraging the scrum / agile methodology as part of product management, including experience working with epic, user story, feature, and task tracking software (for example, Jira)
- Familiarity with community management and content strategy a plus
Data Insights & Analysis
- Conducting data analysis and reporting, including familiarity with data aggregation and visualization tools (for example, Power BI)
- Familiarity with scenario planning and business process modeling
Partnerships & Collaboration
- Collaborating with business / program, marketing and IT staff
Team & Org Contributions
- Communicating and working with teammates / partners who are based throughout the country using remote technologies (for example, Slack and Zoom)
Work Demands
- National travel for in-person meetings approximately once per quarter; some weekend and evening work expected
Product Strategy / Leadership
- Passionate about educational equity and the potential of our alumni community, as well as a demonstrated commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusiveness
- Able to think big, generate ideas and drive solutions to complex problems in a fast-paced, deadline-driven environment
- Passion for making sense of user behavior and serving as a dedicated advocate of a user-centered approach
- Strong user-facing skills with the ability to influence, advise, mediate, and control scope
- A strong understanding of the agile software development methodology
- Strong project management skills and attention to detail
- Excellent judgment and effective prioritization
- Ability to maintain a sense of possibility in the face of obstacles, and balance both short and long-term results
Data Insights & Analysis
- Strong data insights, analysis and reporting skills
- Ability to gather and analyze landscape data to drive user engagement strategy at scale for alumni, corps members, staff and partners
- Ability to facilitate effective input gathering and analysis to ensure that our technology strategy and outcomes are informed by key stakeholders
- Ability to utilize user research to evaluate ideas / initiatives for effectiveness and ability to scale
Partnerships & Collaboration
- Experience working across teams, with a deep sense of humility and openness to the perspectives of others while also being able to build investment and influence others to reach key decisions and outcomes
- Ability to develop and cultivate effective relationships with diverse stakeholders and support them in contributing to a shared goal
- Ability to quickly understand cross-team dynamics and create optimal communication and working structures between different internal teams, especially MCT and IT
Team & Org Contributions
- Ability to work well, both independently and collaboratively
- Ability to surface, address, and resolve conflict / differing points of view in a productive manner