Product Manager – Contractor (1099)

InStride is a human capital management company dedicated to empowering employees through education programs. The Product Manager will be responsible for leading product initiatives, collaborating with engineering teams, and ensuring product solutions meet the needs of corporate partners and learners.

Responsibilities:

• Lead end-to-end product lifecycle from discovery through launch, ensuring timely execution and high-quality delivery
• Accountable for a roadmap of features and capabilities to ensure a scalable and high-quality experience for learners and/or corporate partners
• Lead product work for pods focused on technical initiatives, including internal support tools, partner eligibility management, core platform/API evolution, and front-end framework migration
• Partner closely with engineering to define scope, sequence work, manage dependencies, and make informed tradeoffs that balance delivery, scalability, and technical quality
• Ensure technical initiatives are clearly tied to business outcomes, operational efficiency, or future product capabilities
• Lead partnership with other departments to ensure proper triage, review and prioritization of feature and/or bug requests from internal and external stakeholders
• Define, track, and report on key product metrics; leverage data analytics and user research to guide decisions and to continuously improve product performance and user experience
• Support exploration and go-to-market of new business solutions and features in collaboration with other teams, including representing the product team in strategic partnership conversations
• Maintain a solid understanding of the problems and needs of working adult learners and employer partners, by proactively reviewing and analyzing available market data and internal data (e.g., A/B testing, learner survey data, platform usage data) and seeking opportunities to obtain firsthand learnings (e.g., watch Gong recordings of sales calls, join/lead user experience interviews)
• Translate market and business needs into product solutions and features

Requirements:

• 5+ years of product management or similar experience, preferably in edtech or HR tech
• Bachelor's degree or relevant work experience
• Experience with agile software development practices and experience crafting epics, user stories, building agile processes, backlog management, and roadmap planning
• Experience leading or significantly contributing to platform, infrastructure-adjacent, or internal product initiatives (e.g., APIs, internal tools, system integrations, migrations)
• Comfortable context-switching between deeply technical problem spaces and customer- or partner-facing feature development
• Experience leading technical conversations with less technical internal and external stakeholders (e.g., corporate and/or higher education leaders)
• Understands the value of strong documentation, knowledge management, and impact measurement
• Enjoys tackling open-ended, ambiguous problems and delving into new topics, domains, and techniques; can process a large amount of information and distill into recommendations
• No job too small attitude / roll up sleeves mentality; proactive with a bias for speed and action; able to handle multiple, competing (and sometimes unexpected) demands
• Ability to translate complex market and business needs into clear product requirements
• Comfort leading highly technical initiatives such as platform enhancements, internal tools, system integrations, and architectural or framework migrations; able to engage engineers in detailed discussions and understand tradeoffs
• Ability to reason about complex systems, dependencies, data flows, and long-term scalability when defining product direction
• Strong analytical skills and inclination to use data (or proxy data) to inform decisions and prioritization
• Strong verbal and written communication across a diverse set of partners and team members; writes clearly, succinctly, and in a compelling manner
• Able to build rapport and trust across stakeholder groups; strong listener who displays emotional intelligence
• Experience partnering cross-functionally to effectively ask questions, listen, uncover perspectives, present options, build consensus, and effectuate new ideas; Proven experience working closely with engineering teams to shape solutions, sequence work, and balance technical health with business outcomes
• Designs strong project plans, effectively mobilizes colleagues across teams, and ensures the work is completed on time and to a high standard