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 iPad, 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 5 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 Product Manager to 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 prioritising product features accordingly
- Developing use cases through interviews and observations of school stakeholders
- Producing wireframes that show the intended solution, and developing the UX and flow of the product
- Effectively managing a distributed workforce of designers and engineers
- Prioritising the product roadmap and using agile methodologies to build the product to tight deadlines
- 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 in specific 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.