About UPchieve
UPchieve is an edtech nonprofit that provides free, 24/7 online tutoring and college counseling to low-income high school students in the U.S. Using our app, students can request and get paired with a live, volunteer tutor in under 5 minutes. Our mission is to democratize access to academic support so that all students, regardless of income, have an equal opportunity to finish high school, attend college, and achieve upward mobility. So far, we’ve matched 60,000+ on-demand tutoring requests from 15,000+ students across all 50 states. Our work has also been recognized by Forbes and TIME, and our funders include both Y Combinator and the Gates Foundation.
Who we’re looking for
We’re a small team taking on the monumental challenge of democratizing access to academic support. That means we need team members who are excited by autonomy and willing to work on projects outside the scope of their job description if needed. Regardless of role, we also look for candidates who have a personal connection to our cause or a demonstrable interest in education or serving low-income populations.
About Our Team & Office
- We’re a remote-first team located across the U.S.
- We highly value diversity of experiences and perspectives. 2/3 of the team are people of color, and many of us have personal experience growing up low-income or navigating nontraditional educational pathways
- We believe working full-time means 40 hours/week. Non-work stuff is important too!
Our Benefits
- 3 weeks paid vacation AND 3 weeks of paid holidays (including all days between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Day)
- Flexible work schedule (choose your own hours)
- $1,000 annual professional development budget (learning and self-improvement is a huge part of our work culture!)
- We offer up to 100% covered health insurance on select plans that start on your first day!
About the role
UPchieve is looking for our first-ever Product Lead to help us level up our product development. As the Product Lead, you’ll report to and work closely with UPchieve’s Executive Director to create and maintain UPchieve’s product roadmap. You’ll also regularly speak with our users (students and volunteers), external stakeholders (schools and companies), and internal stakeholders (individual team members and leadership) to ensure we are always working on the most important thing in the most efficient way possible. Because this is our first product hire, you’ll spend a lot of your time in the first year designing and implementing processes that help us deliver features and achieve our mission faster.
This might be the right job for you if…
- You’re super excited by the idea of working at an early stage, YC-funded edtech nonprofit
- You feel a strong connection with and/or care deeply about our primary users (low-income high school students)
- You’re up for the challenge of building a platform on par with other successful consumer-facing educational platforms like Khan Academy and Duolingo
- You’re willing and capable of being a one-person product team—taking on any and all product-related tasks until we’re able to grow the team
- You want to work closely with UPchieve’s leadership and grow into a Head of Product role in the next few years
What you’ll do
- Gain a deep understanding of our users (low-income high school students, volunteers) and other stakeholders (schools/nonprofits, teachers, parents, funders, and corporate partners)
- Create and maintain an internal product roadmap that is aligned with both our high-level theory of change and our quarterly and annual OKRs
- Create and maintain a public, prioritized list of issues and epics which open source developers can contribute to
- Manage biweekly sprints, including sprint planning, story writing, requirement workshops, etc.
- Coordinate internal product ideation meetings and facilitate communication between business, design, and engineering
- Develop, refine and scale product-related processes (e.g., tracking of bugs and customer feedback)
- Define and measure product experiments and analyze data to determine the effectiveness of platform changes
- Supervise our UI/UX designer (and potentially other team members in the future)
We’re looking for someone who…
- Has 3+ years of product management experience for a consumer tech startup
- Has seen and worked with multiple product methodologies, processes, and engineering teams
- Is highly organized and methodical when it comes to documentation, exploring edge cases, and planning sprints
- Is a strong communicator capable of facilitating discussions and gathering consensus
- (Bonus) You are a former engineer or are technically fluent enough to estimate story points appropriately
- (Bonus) You can run SQL queries and utilize data to make decisions with minimal support
- (Bonus) Prior experience with any of the following: tutoring, college advising, product design, user research, people management
Recruitment Process
Our process: Screening call (~30 mins) → Project (max 3 hours) → Interviews (~3 hours) → (Optional) Team meet-and-greet → Reference checks & offer!
Note that it can take us a few weeks from when you submit your application to invite you to a screening call. Unfortunately, we can typically only bring the top ~15 candidates forward to screening calls (which for some roles may work out to < 10% of applicants).