Advanced Specialist, Product Management

Pearson is an education and learning company building new AI-enabled products for enterprise clients. The Advanced Specialist, Product Management role leads zero-to-one product discovery, validation, and early scaling decisions, working with customers, engineers, designers, and internal partner teams. The role focuses on experimentation, enterprise integrations, business cases, and evidence-based product strategy.

Responsibilities:

• Own discovery: get close to enterprise customers — buyers, administrators, learners, and IT — and to the market, and turn what you find into problems worth betting on
• Frame every bet as a set of testable hypotheses, then define the smallest experience that answers the riskiest question first
• Design and run validation with the design engineer and product engineer: interviews, concept tests, prototypes, and pilots with real clients
• Make kill, pivot, or persevere calls on evidence rather than sentiment — and write the narrative clearly either way
• Navigate the Pearson portfolio: identify which existing Pearson products a concept should build on, and create the internal partnerships to make it real
• Treat integration as a product requirement from day one. Enterprise products live or die by how they fit into client ecosystems, and you'll own that fit alongside the engineers
• Build the business case and tell the story — to clients, to ELS leadership, and to the partner teams whose support each bet needs
• Do whatever the bet needs: write the interview guide, build the model, draft the one-pager, or prototype a concept yourself with AI tools when that's the fastest path to learning

Requirements:

• Senior product management experience with a demonstrated zero-to-one track record: products or major bets you took from concept through validation to launch — including some you killed. We'll want to hear about those too
• Enterprise and B2B fluency: you understand multi-stakeholder adoption where the buyer isn't the user, and you've navigated procurement, security review, and change management
• Strong experimentation instincts: hypothesis design, qualitative and quantitative validation, and honest, evidence-based decision-making
• Excellent communication — crisp writing, compelling narrative, and equal comfort presenting to executives and sketching with engineers
• The ability to run multiple concurrent workstreams through ambiguity without losing the thread on any of them
• Enough technical depth to hold a real conversation about APIs, integrations, and system constraints. You don't need to write the code, but you do need to reason about it
• Flexible. Bets change, priorities shift, and fidelity ranges from napkin sketch to production. You move fluidly between them
• Not precious. Some of what we build will be thrown away — that's the process working, not failing. You hold your work loosely and your standards tightly
• Comfortable in parallel. You'll usually carry more than one workstream at a time, and you can context-switch without dropping threads
• A systems thinker. You can understand complex systems — technical, organizational, or both — and figure out how to work effectively within them
• A genuine problem-solver. You start from the problem, not from your job title or your favorite solution
• Good with people. You build trust quickly across teams, disciplines, and levels — inside Pearson and with clients
• Principled and pragmatic. You follow the rules that matter — ethics, privacy, security, and accessibility are non-negotiable — and you know how to flex in and out of heavyweight structures when a small, fast-moving team calls for it
• A clear communicator. You make your thinking legible in writing, diagrams, demos, and rooms full of executives or engineers
• Ego-free about execution. Everyone on this team is willing to write ALL the code or NONE of the code, depending on what the bet needs
• Comfortable in discomfort. Ambiguity, unfamiliar domains, and half-formed ideas are the raw material of this job
• An independent thinker. You form your own view, argue for it well, and update it quickly when the evidence says you should
• Knowledge of the enterprise learning ecosystem: the LMS/LXP/HRIS landscape, skills frameworks, credentialing, and how L&D organizations actually buy
• Familiarity with learning and integration standards (LTI, SCORM, xAPI; SSO and SCIM) — enough to be credible with client IT teams
• Formal research training, or deep experience partnering closely with researchers
• Committee, consortium, or industry working-group experience