About Us
For 40 years, Committee for Children (CFC) has been helping children around the world learn, grow, and thrive by teaching them how to understand emotions, build meaningful relationships, and resolve conflicts. Our research based social emotional learning (SEL) programs are used in more than 30 percent of US elementary schools and 70 countries worldwide. These programs help as estimated 14 million children each year stay safe, respect themselves and others, succeed in school today and build a better world for tomorrow.
This year, we’re celebrating our 40th anniversary by setting an ambitious goal for the future: to positively transform the social-emotional well-being of 100 million children annually by 2028. To achieve this, CFC is looking for an exceptional leader to join our product team and enable our vision of “Safe Children Thriving in a Peaceful World”.
The Role
In partnership with the VP Product, the Director of Product Management will help codify CFC’s short- and long-term product vision and will implement a roadmap that delivers mission aligned, digitally inspired products and services into a rapidly changing and growing SEL marketplace.
With a keen eye toward evolving and growing the product management discipline within the organization, the Director of Product Management will provide day-to-day operational leadership for the product team, ensuring tight linkages across product priorities, market and customer requirements. In this role you will lead and mentor a team of product managers, while inspiring cross-functional collaboration and alignment.
Our ideal candidate will have proven success in a product leadership role and a solid understanding of the education, e-learning marketplace.
Primary responsibilities for the role include:
Direct CFC’s Product Strategy and Roadmap
- In collaboration with the VP of Product, define the product vision and strategy
- Build and incorporate education market and competitive understanding to ensure vision is forward-leaning, differentiated, and effective in delivering desired outcomes
- Build a product roadmap and strategy for developing innovative products and features while prioritizing on-time product delivery
Direct Product Delivery and Execution
- Create a framework to define prioritization, roadmap planning and success metrics
- Work with product managers and scrum masters to translate the product vision into a technically feasible plan for execution, managing for capabilities, risks and target market needs/constraints
- Continue to develop and manage a scalable design and development process using Agile/Scrum methodologies
- Ensure effective staffing, processes and culture to deliver innovative digital and hybrid products in the proper balance of time, cost and capability
- Develop and prioritize features and add-on services that:
- Increase Impact on Student’s SEL Skills, Knowledge, and Goals
- Increase CFC’s Reach by attracting new clients and expanding existing implementations
- Increase the Quality of CFC Programs
- Provide Best in Class Implementation Support to Increase Impact
Develop Effective Working Relationships
- Develop and lead a high performing product team by aligning the team’s goals with the organization’s strategies
- Manage employee development, reward, and coaching activities to generate a shared understanding of the product management function, building on best practices, and fostering creativity and innovation
- Lead and develop a diverse team of professionals, creating an atmosphere that unleashes creativity and maximizes impact
- Coordinate closely with co-members of director team.
Qualifications
• Genuine passion for and intensely motivated by the mission, vision and goal of positively impacting 100M children each year.
• Bachelor’s Degree; advanced degree in Education and/or MBA preferred.
• 3+ years of experience as a Manager of Product Management in a B2B organization, preferably SAAS.
• 5+ years of experience in leading and developing product management teams.
• Experience managing multiple products in development across a single portfolio.
• Demonstrated proficiency working with sales and marketing leaders to bring clarity to the marketplace on offerings, value, and vision.
• Demonstrated technical fluency and effectiveness working closely with engineers and data scientists.
• Demonstrated ability to develop and lead cross-functional teams combined with strong stakeholder management, project management and leadership skills.
• Experience with agile development methodologies like scrum.
• Experience building new category offerings is a plus, and education/e-learning market experience is strongly desired.
• Sound judgment paired with the ability to act independently and a willingness to resolve issues and problems in a timely manner
• Strategic planning skills with experience leading a team through transformation
• Passion for coaching and developing high performing teams
• Some travel required (0-10%)