Product Manager
Job description
About the role
This role guides feature development for the Newsela platform within the Product Management team. The position focuses on improving the platform to serve teachers and students effectively. Success is defined by meaningful classroom learning outcomes.
Product managers decide what a team builds and why. They gather customer feedback, define requirements, and set priorities. Product work spans engineering, design, and business teams and ships products that solve real problems. The role combines research, writing, analysis, and decision making under uncertainty. Product work happens at the intersection of user needs, business goals, and technical feasibility. Most product managers own a roadmap and are judged by the outcomes their teams ship.
Key facts
What you'll do
Solutions are created to influence teaching and learning in classrooms. These solutions are shaped through collaboration with design and content experts from discovery through launch to meet classroom needs.
The platform experience is defined by setting scope and priority in partnership with engineering. Clear requirements and schedules are maintained to keep cross-functional partners aligned on timelines.
High-impact features are delivered alongside an AI-forward engineering team through close partnership. Data is analyzed to evaluate effectiveness, identify problems, and find the greatest opportunity areas for impact.
Requirements
The posting states a bachelor's degree requirement. Experience in product management over 3+ years is required for scaling products successfully in EdTech or instructional settings. Experience in EdTech, K-12 education, SaaS, or instructional products is strongly preferred to understand classroom contexts.
Design and subject-matter experts are collaborated with to shape features beyond handing off requirements, ensuring solutions address real pedagogical needs. Comfort using AI tools in daily product work is demonstrated, with genuine enthusiasm for a team that builds with AI at its core to accelerate delivery.
Strong analytical skills allow data investigation directly without relying on others for answers to inform decisions. Employment is contingent on successful background checks as part of the pre-employment process for all offers.
Practical notes
Employment is available to US-based remote workers, and a monthly stipend supports home office setup. Incoming team members must align with inclusive benefits that support families and professional growth.
Typical interview steps
Product interviews often include a product sense round, an analytical round, and a behavioral round. Candidates may be asked to design a feature, prioritize a backlog, or estimate a metric. Some loops include a case exercise. Strong candidates show structured thinking and customer empathy. Interviewers want to see how you prioritize when everything matters. Walking through your decision criteria out loud is a strong habit in product interviews.
Good to know
Product managers operate in a collaborative environment focused on education outcomes and classroom impact. Data-driven decisions guide feature direction and priority setting in product workflows. Modern product workflows use AI tools to accelerate development, testing, and iteration cycles.
Questions to ask
Good questions to ask the employer in the interview: what does success look like in the first six months, how is the team structured, what is the current biggest challenge, and how are decisions made. Asking about growth paths and the review process is also well received. Employers expect questions, and good ones show preparation.
Career growth
Product careers usually move from associate to product manager, then to senior, group, or director levels. Some people specialize in growth, platform, or enterprise products. Others move into general management. Success depends on shipped outcomes rather than shipped output. Product careers often reward generalists early and specialists later. Experience shipping measurable outcomes is the strongest signal for promotion.