The posting
- 1-year contract, renewable
- Government project
- Hybrid work arrangement
About TechBuddy
TechBuddy is SSOE’s unified user platform for resolving day-to-day technology issues across mobile and desktop web platforms. It is designed as a mobile-first, internet-accessible, single point of contact that helps educators find answers, complete self-service tasks and obtain assisted support with minimal disruption to teaching time.
The product is currently being piloted for teacher password-reset and BitLocker recovery journeys, alongside useful announcements from HQ. Its roadmap includes student password resets, school device loans and collections, school announcements, and additional high-value support journeys shaped by user feedback and operational data.
About the Role
We are looking for a Product Operations Specialist with 3–5 years of experience to establish and run the operating practices that help TechBuddy deliver reliably and improve continuously. You will connect the product team with schools, service desk teams, local administrators, vendors and MOE stakeholders—ensuring that launches are ready, support handoffs work, feedback becomes insight, and operational risks are addressed early.
This is not an administrative coordination role. You will own operational outcomes across the product lifecycle, build scalable playbooks and operating cadences, and provide product managers, designers and engineers with the information and structure they need to make better decisions.
What You Will Be Working On
Product Launch and Change Readiness
- Own operational readiness for pilots, feature launches and phased school rollouts, including readiness criteria, stakeholder communications, training, support materials and go-live checklists.
- Coordinate dependencies and decision points across product, engineering, UX, school operations, service desk teams, local administrators and vendors.
- Plan user onboarding and change activities that help educators understand new capabilities and adopt them with minimal disruption.
- Run post-launch reviews and translate lessons learned into improved playbooks, controls and ways of working.
Support Operations and Service Reliability
- Design and maintain support models, triage paths, escalation matrices, runbooks and ownership boundaries for self-service and assisted-support journeys.
- Monitor operational health, service levels, failure points and recurring support demand, and coordinate incident response and follow-through with accountable teams.
- Drive problem-management reviews for recurring issues and ensure that root causes, corrective actions and user communications are tracked through to closure.
- Maintain accurate operational documentation and knowledge content so that schools and support teams receive consistent guidance.
Voice of the User, Insights and Product Improvement
- Establish systematic feedback loops across in-product feedback, school engagement, support cases, user research and stakeholder channels.
- Define and maintain dashboards for adoption, completion, drop-off, escalation, turnaround time, support deflection, satisfaction and other agreed product-health measures.
- Synthesise operational data and user feedback into actionable insights for product prioritisation, service improvement and release decisions.
- Partner with Product Management and UX to close the loop with users and track how validated insights are converted into product or process improvements.
Operational Excellence and Governance
- Create reusable playbooks, templates, governance routines and product operating cadences that scale across new TechBuddy use cases.
- Facilitate regular operational reviews, risk reviews, launch checkpoints and cross-functional decision forums, with clear actions and owners.
- Identify bottlenecks and automate or simplify workflows using appropriate tools and low-code approaches where useful.
- Support audit, privacy, security, accessibility and records-management requirements by ensuring that operational controls and evidence are maintained.
- Administer and improve product collaboration and knowledge tools such as Jira, Confluence, dashboards and feedback repositories.
What We Are Looking For
- 3–5 years of professional experience in product operations, digital product delivery, service operations, business analysis, project management or a related role within a technology environment.
- Demonstrated ownership of launches, operational processes or ongoing support for a digital product or service.
- Strong analytical skills and the ability to turn product, operational and user data into clear recommendations, with working proficiency in spreadsheets and dashboarding or visualisation tools.
- Experience with agile product delivery and tools such as Jira, Confluence or equivalent platforms.
- A practical understanding of incident, problem, change or service-management practices; formal ITIL certification is advantageous but not required.
- Experience designing SOPs, playbooks, metrics, feedback loops and cross-functional operating cadences.
- Strong systems thinking and attention to detail, with the judgement to distinguish one-off exceptions from patterns that require scalable solutions.
- Excellent written and verbal communication, facilitation and stakeholder-management skills, including the ability to influence without formal authority.
- Comfortable working autonomously in ambiguous environments and moving between strategic improvement and hands-on execution.
- User-centred and service-minded, with empathy for educators and support teams working under operational pressure.
- Experience in public-sector digital services, education technology, school operations, enterprise IT support or vendor-managed services is advantageous but not required.
What Success Looks Like
- TechBuddy launches are operationally ready, with clear ownership, communications and support paths, resulting in fewer last-minute issues.
- Users receive timely and consistent support, while recurring incidents are reduced through structured problem management.
- Product decisions are informed by reliable adoption, journey and service data—not anecdotal evidence alone.
- User feedback is captured, triaged and addressed through closed-loop processes, and is visibly converted into product or process improvements.
- Reusable playbooks and operating cadences enable TechBuddy to add new school use cases without reinventing the process each time.
/Ref: T24-332
