The posting
Minerva Project | Fully remote, worldwide
Annual compensation: US$100,000–$125,000, depending on experience.
Nurturing critical wisdom for the sake of the world
Why should you join Minerva? The salary and benefits are competitive; the people you’ll work with are authentic, thoughtful, driven, and human; but the reason we chose Minerva is our strong belief in the company’s mission: if we want to change the world, it’s imperative that we improve education everywhere.
As our first step to achieving that goal, we built Minerva University from the ground up, refining and improving every aspect of a traditional university. Minerva University boasts an unbiased admissions process, seminars instead of lectures, and a global experience over 4 years; and has been named the most innovative university in the world - three times. Now, we are expanding our reach and impact by partnering with emerging and established higher education institutions around the world.
Our methodology, which emphasizes active class participation, deliberate practice, and other empirically-proven methods, is enabled by Minerva Forum. Built to address the central educational challenges of the modern era, Minerva Forum embodies the leading research on the science of learning to enable the rapid development of sophisticated, durable skills-based programs.
The role
We're looking for a senior product manager who can turn user needs, partner requirements and business goals into clear product decisions, then work with design and engineering to get the right changes shipped.
You'll own the problem, priority, scope and success measures for your product work. You'll get close enough to the details to make useful tradeoffs, while keeping the team focused on the outcome we're trying to achieve. This is a hands-on individual contributor role in a small team, with substantial responsibility for moving work forward independently.
What you'll do
- Decide what to work on and why. Bring together user research, support patterns, partner feedback and business priorities. Make a clear case for the problems worth solving now and the work that can wait.
- Own scope and sequence. Define goals, non-goals, acceptance criteria and dependencies. Work with engineering on capacity and feasibility, and keep the roadmap realistic when priorities compete.
- Connect product, design and engineering. Give designers the context and constraints they need, evaluate options together, and resolve product questions as implementation progresses. Keep decisions and their reasoning clear enough for people to work asynchronously.
- Make success measurable. Define useful measures such as adoption, task completion, failure rates or support load. Agree with engineering on the tracking needed before release, check that the data is usable, and use what we learn to decide what happens next.
- Manage stakeholder needs and commitments. Understand the needs of partners, academic teams, support and leadership, including integration, privacy and operational constraints. Make conflicting priorities visible and communicate changes early. Work directly with partners when needed to understand product needs, and coordinate with Support and account management on issues, expectations and follow-through.
- Carry work through release. Help test important workflows, prioritize defects and decide whether remaining gaps affect release readiness. Decide who needs to know about a change, when, and how it should be explained to customers. Work with the people closest to the product and its users to make launch communication and documentation accurate.
- Follow up after launch. Look at actual use and feedback, identify where the result differs from the intention, and turn that into concrete product improvements.
What you'll bring
- Experience independently owning software product work from problem definition through launch and follow-up, with clear examples of decisions you made and what happened as a result.
- Sound judgment about prioritization and scope. You can explain what you chose not to build, what evidence informed the choice, and when you changed your mind.
- Experience working closely with designers and engineers on products with complex workflows, multiple user roles or competing stakeholder needs.
- Comfort reasoning with data, asking what a metric really tells us, and making decisions when the available evidence is incomplete.
- Strong writing and clear communication with both technical and nontechnical people. You can make a complicated product decision understandable without hiding the tradeoffs.
- The ability to organize your own work, surface risks early and close open questions in a distributed team.
- An interest in education and the patience to understand how learners, educators and administrators actually use software.
Experience in education or education technology—including teaching—as well as work with institutional customers, learning-platform integrations or product analytics, is a plus. Show us the relevant work and judgment you've developed; a specific degree or tool background isn't the focus of this search.
Working together
This position is fully remote. We welcome candidates anywhere in the world who can maintain regular working-hour overlap with the team. We'll confirm the required window early in the process.
You'll work closely with product and technology leadership, design, engineering and partner-facing colleagues. You'll have room to make decisions within an agreed area of responsibility, with leadership involved in company priorities and commitments beyond that scope.
What to share
Please share your resume or profile and a brief example of a product decision you owned: the problem, the options you considered, your choice and what you learned after shipping. Existing work or an anonymized summary is welcome.
