Senior Product Manager

We’re people on a mission to help schools use data more effectively to save teachers time and improve student outcomes. Data at the moment is more of a burden than a benefit to teachers. Schools are increasingly required to store vast amounts of information, such as attendance, behaviour and assessment of students, which takes teachers hours and hours a week to input and often isn’t used effectively to improve student performance.

We’ve built a system that improves the input, analysis and communication of school information, saving teachers days of precious time and allowing them to target student interventions more effectively to improve the outcomes of hundreds of thousands of children. Imagine taking the register on your iPhone, then having the system instantly text all parents whose child was not in school asking them to confirm absence by texting the school back. Easy. Next, imagine that the system knows how serious an absence is by comparing it to the past 10 years of each student’s attendance, and shows teachers whether this drop is unusual for that particular child in order to recommend an intervention before that child drops out.

Since our launch 4 years ago, we’ve raised venture capital from top-tier, socially-minded investors, expanded to 60 people in 3 countries, and are now working with thousands of schools, helping them to improve outcomes for hundreds of thousands of students. We care about our social goals as much as our business targets, and want to make a lasting, positive impact across the education sector. We’re looking for passionate, curious, ambitious people who share our ethos and want to make an impact at scale.

Job Description

We’re looking for a talented Senior Product Manager to lead a team of 4 product managers, and to help us to double it in size this year. You’ll work alongside our schools, engineers and designers to develop and improve our core product offering. This is a very unusual role both in terms of its scope, level of responsibility and impact – you’ll be directly driving the development of a product used by hundreds of thousands of users to improve impact for millions of students.

You will need to demonstrate high levels of empathy to identify articulated and unarticulated needs of headteachers, teachers, administrators and parents. This is much harder than it sounds! Once these needs have been identified, you’ll need to develop the specification for a solution, and turn this into a reality by leading a team of designers and engineers. You’ll be the mastermind of the product with full ownership and responsibility of the end result. To do this you’ll need to have a high attention to detail, and a big passion for improving school outcomes.
Specific responsibilities will include:

  • Understanding the commercial context and balancing competing priorities across the entire product roadmap
  • Maintaining and prioritising the overall product roadmap, and evangelising agile methodologies to make sure the team can build the product to tight deadlines
  • Mentoring, training and managing the team of product managers to drive excellence in terms of user research, wire-framing, UX, agile process, sprint planning
  • Taking full ownership of the outcome. Sharing the success with the team and learning from mistakes
  • Helping to market the solution, increasing engagement and NPS metrics
  • Becoming a domain expert across all areas of Arbor’s product. Speaking at conferences to school and industry stakeholders, as well as internally educating Arbor’s partnership and engagement teams on the use of the product.

REQUIREMENTS

The Prerequisites

  • At least 4 years of Product Management experience
  • At least 2 years of experience working directly on an Enterprise SaaS product
  • Practical, on-the-job knowledge of the UK education system is a strong advantage, a demonstrated passion for improving education outcomes is a must!
  • You must intuitively know what being “10x better” looks like
  • Outstanding track record and academic performance – this is a unique role
  • You need to be a self-starter who can demonstrate working independently and taking full ownership of projects
  • An understanding of both UX and UI, with the ability to talk expertly about both when challenged
  • Ability to empathise with school stakeholders, identify needs and translate into a design concept

BENEFITS

The Package

  • Highly competitive salary depending on experience
  • 25 days holiday

The Perks:

  • Pick your own equipment: Macbook Air, iPhone, iPads and peripherals
  • Pick your own software to get the job done – just be awesome at whatever you use
  • Beer Fridays, regular events and unmissable company-wide parties with a fun-loving team
  • Choice of music all day long on the office jukebox (we welcome all tastes)
  • Enjoy coming in every day, see the impact of your own work, and know that you’re making a positive difference to the world

If this sounds like something you can handle and would like to be a part of, then we would love to hear from you!