The Product Manager is a key member of Teach For America’s product management team, focusing on content products such as teachforamerica.org, Teach For America’s website. The focus of the role is to maximize the value of teachforamerica.org and other participant-facing TFA digital properties for prospects, Teach For America corps members, alumni, and other users. As Product Manager you will be responsible for gathering, understanding, and documenting user needs related to the website or other products (in collaboration with our Insights and UX teams), and developing and maintaining backlogs of features for those products. You will be deeply connected to the web engineering team, user experience designers, and content producers and should be comfortable owning the chain of communication between business/user needs and the resulting execution of the work. This role is also responsible for content structuring and modeling which defines the relationships between content. The work you do will be central to how Teach For America achieves its powerful mission to transform society through educational reform. You will report to the Managing Director of Product Management and collaborate closely with Teach For America’s marketing and communications team, technology team, and other business partners.
Product
- Identify, collect and document user needs and goals
- Facilitate requirements sessions with multiple stakeholders to understand intersection of user needs and business needs
- Identify, collect, and document technical and business requirements
- Develop the design documents, requirements analysis, testing plans, process flows, procedures, and policies required to ensure transparency and clarity in the web development process
- Translate high level solutions into detailed user stories
- Align the business needs of stakeholders with the technology solutions
- Work with organizations and technical teams from multiple organizations
- Advocate for and operate under an agile/Lean UX environment with confidence
Content Strategy
- Determine the right technical structure of the content to maximize its potential, making personalization work and ensuring that the right content is surfaced at the right time to the right user
- Define how data should be structured and delivered to users by defining data models and how the data relates to each other and the user
- Define how data should be optimized for Search Engine Optimization using Schema.org, Metatags, and Open Graph
- Own the establishment of SEO standards and ensure that the content development team adheres to them as they enter content into Teach for America’s content management system (CMS)
- Help drive the improvement of Teach For America’s CMS (Drupal) and related tools for ensuring traceability of content
- In collaboration with editorial colleagues, establish a process for using data-driven insights, shifts in the market, and technology advancements to evolve the underlying content strategy, and communicate these changes to the organization
- Develop standards and best practices for creation, management, maintenance, and governance of content, overseeing both editorial and technological processes in an agile/Lean UX environment
- 4-7 years of business application and system related work experience in a large, complex organization
- Experience working with both business and IT groups
- Familiarity with Drupal, PHP, and other web development technologies preferred
- Familiarity with data modeling and content strategy
- Experience working with epic, user story, feature, and task tracking software (for example, Jira) for purposes of software development
Skills
- Strong analytical and business process modeling skills
- Strong user-facing skills with the ability to influence, advise, mediate, and control scope
- A strong understanding of the agile software development methodology
- Passionate about educational equity 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
- An exceptional writer and oral communicator
- Skilled in the art of persuasion, with a deep sense of humility and openness to the perspectives of others
- Able to maintain a sense of possibility in the face of obstacles, and balance both short and long-term results
Work Demands
- National travel for in-person meetings approximately once per quarter; some weekend and evening work expected