Staff Product Manager

Instructure is dedicated to empowering individuals through intuitive educational products. They are seeking a Staff Product Manager to lead the integration of AI learning tools into their core ecosystems, focusing on innovative solutions that enhance learning experiences for students globally.

Responsibilities:

• Evolve & Execute the "Learner Agent" Strategy: Working in concert with executive leadership, you will take our initial strategic vision and evolve it into a concrete, executable roadmap. You will act as the primary owner of the tactical definition, normalizing requirements across Higher Ed, K12, Career, and the standalone Athena contexts to ensure our agent strategy scales effectively
• Unify the Agent Architecture & B2C Innovation: Athena serves a dual purpose: it is a standalone student app (B2C) and the intelligence engine for Canvas. You will drive product discovery for the standalone app while collaborating with Academic and Career teams to ensure the shared "Athena Brain" backend meets the needs of all three contexts. You will educate internal stakeholders on AI constraints to build a cohesive, prioritized backlog
• Orchestrate Cross-Team Alignment: You will act as the connective tissue between the Incubation, Career, and Academic teams. Your role is to build understanding of AI capabilities across the organization and drive consensus on priorities, ensuring that the rapid experimentation of Incubation aligns with the stability requirements of core Canvas products
• Drive Research & Thought Leadership: You will collaborate with internal and external research partners to measure the pedagogical efficacy of our AI tools. You will champion these findings globally, representing Instructure at industry conferences and contributing to the broader conversation on the role of AI in education
• Discovery & Stakeholder Engagement: You will work directly with students, institutional admins, and faculty to validate hypotheses. You will move beyond "AI hype" to discover high-value, high-efficacy use cases
• Champion "Realist" AI: You will be the voice of reason. You will promise what is possible, not just what is popular. You will help the organization distinguish between the theoretical limits of LLMs and the practical realities of a classroom or corporate training environment

Requirements:

• 8+ years of Product Management experience, with at least 3 years in a Staff/Principal or Lead role
• Demonstrated experience shipping AI/ML products, specifically those involving LLMs or conversational agents
• Strong technical literacy: Ability to understand complex system architectures and discuss trade-offs (e.g., context window limits, retrieval strategies, model fine-tuning vs. prompting). You don't need to write code, but you must be able to read research papers and API documentation to assess feasibility and inform decisions
• Proven ability to work in a matrixed organization, influencing teams without direct authority
• Experience in EdTech or a strong passion for the domain is highly preferred