Senior Product Manager, Student Support Services

Encoura is hiring a Senior Product Manager to lead strategy, roadmaps, and business outcomes for its One Stop and Help Desk offerings. The role guides omnichannel contact center services and conversational AI, aligning cross-functional teams to improve student support, customer experience, operational performance, and growth.

Responsibilities:

• Own and communicate the One Stop and Help Desk product vision, strategy, multi-quarter roadmap, and prioritized backlog, balancing client needs, competitive differentiation, commercial opportunities, technical investment, and operational efficiency
• Set product direction for Amazon Connect-based omnichannel experiences, including IVR, intelligent routing, queue management, agent desktop/workflows, integrations, reporting, workforce management, and quality assurance; partner with engineering on architectural tradeoffs and scalability
• Lead the strategy and delivery of conversational AI across voice and chat—including virtual agents, knowledge-grounded answers, automated resolutions, intent recognition, escalation to human agents, and conversation analytics—with explicit quality, safety, and performance measure
• Conduct market and customer discovery with higher education institutions, frontline agents, service operations, implementation, sales, and client success; map end-to-end service journeys and translate unmet needs into differentiated product opportunities
• Define business cases, success metrics, and performance targets; own product-level accountability for CSAT, NPS, customer effort, digital containment, AHT, FCR, self-service adoption, call abandonment, agent productivity, and SLA performance, in partnership with operating teams
• Use contact center analytics, speech analytics, conversational intelligence, financial/operational data, and competitive intelligence to evaluate opportunities, prioritize investments, monitor AI accuracy and escalation effectiveness, and drive continuous improvement
• Lead discovery through launch and adoption: define outcomes and requirements, guide UX and technical decisions, make scope and priority tradeoffs, ensure release readiness, and equip go-to-market, implementation, and service teams with positioning and enablement
• Influence senior stakeholders and cross-functional teams without direct authority; proactively manage dependencies, delivery risks, vendor/platform relationships, and roadmap decisions while mentoring less-experienced product colleagues as appropriate

Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree in Business, Information Systems, Computer Science, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
• Typically 5+ years of relevant experience, including significant ownership of SaaS or technology product strategy and delivery
• Deep understanding of contact center operations and service delivery, including omnichannel engagement, IVR, routing and queues, workforce management (WFM), quality assurance (QA), service-level agreements (SLAs), and reporting/analytics
• Hands-on product experience with Amazon Connect (AWS Connect) or a comparable cloud contact center platform; able to make informed decisions about platform capabilities, integrations, vendor dependencies, architectural constraints, and total cost of ownership
• Demonstrated experience launching or scaling conversational AI, chatbots, voice assistants, or automated self-service; understands knowledge management, speech analytics, conversational intelligence, agent handoffs, AI evaluation, and responsible deployment
• Proven ability to define and improve measurable product and operational outcomes, including CSAT, NPS, customer effort, containment, AHT, FCR, self-service adoption, abandonment, agent productivity, and service quality
• Strong product leadership skills in discovery, market assessment, strategy, business cases, roadmap prioritization, agile execution, stakeholder influence, and written and executive-level communication; comfortable using Jira, Confluence, and analytics tools
• Sound commercial and technical judgment; able to work independently through ambiguity, challenge assumptions constructively, negotiate tradeoffs, and align diverse teams around outcomes rather than feature requests
• All applicants must be eligible to work in the U.S
• prior experience with contact center platforms, customer service technology, or managed service-enabled products strongly preferred
• Experience in higher education or EdTech is a plus