Our vision and mission
Local nonprofits around the world work tirelessly to combat poverty, inequality, violence, and environmental degradation. And yet, these organizations often lack access to the very training and resources that could dramatically enhance their ability to improve and save lives. Our role is to help them build the capacity needed to best serve their beneficiaries and effect change.
Philanthropy University has the audacious goal of measurably improving 5,000 nonprofit organizations in emerging economies by 2020 through access to the capital, courses, and community they need to thrive. In 2016, we launched a series of courses and a platform focused on capacity building for civil society, impacting over 250K users from 180 countries.
Through the generous contributions of our funders, we have the multi-million dollar runway and security of a mature organization with the pace and opportunities of a Silicon Valley startup.
Role overview
You will be be a foundational member of Philanthropy University’s product team with ownership of our product roadmap and shaping the development of our product and engineering capabilities. You’ll play a critical role in leading our product through public release, rapid iterations, learning and scaling towards our ambitious vision. Your role is built around the following question:
How do we create and ship digital products that drive us towards our top-line goal to measurably improve the performance of 5,000 nonprofits in emerging economies by 2020?
This role is highly cross-functional and will require a strategic thinker comfortable with (and excited by!) ensuring cross-departmental alignment, building tools, processes and capacity necessary to build a world-class education product from the ground up.
Responsibilities
- Ship products by managing the end-to-end process of conceptualizing products, acting as the glue between technical and non-technical teams, and translating the product vision into a product roadmap and product requirements
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- Develop a framework for evaluating new product features through testing and product metrics based on latest needs and learnings
- Develop processes for working across the organization; disseminate learning and enhance the collective product instinct
- Ruthlessly prioritize by identifying the highest leverage projects and work cross-functionally to set our product roadmap
- Develop and drive SCRUM / agile methodologies
- Produce clear, thorough written specification for all feature functionality and user flows
- Design a product and (eventually, engineering) team capable of hitting and exceeding our organizational KPIs and build it
Qualifications
- A passion for our mission and vision
- An inspiring leadership approach and excellent interpersonal skills
- A knack for organization, planning, and multitasking
- A track-record of aligning teams to launch and ship great products
- Capable of building product and engineering teams
- Resourceful and tenaciously optimistic
Experiences that would be a plus
- You’ve lived or worked a developing country and/or developed products or services with and for those living in developing countries.
- You’ve managed outsourced product design and engineering teams across time zones
- You’ve developed B2B products or products created for organizations
- You’ve developed products that enable learning and facilitate learning communities