Senior Product Manager

Location

This is a remote position that can be based anywhere in the U.S. and requires the majority of working hours each day to fall between 8am and 6pm Eastern Time.

This position requires travel across the United States, expected at about 10-20% of working days (roughly 2-4 days per month), mostly on-site at higher education institutions or conferences.

Salary Range $113,000 - $125,000 annual salary.

Final salary within this range will be based on the candidate's experience and internal equity with team members in similar roles.

Overview

Reporting to the Director, Product Management, the Senior Product Manager owns product strategy and outcomes for one of DataKind's strategic domains, such as Education or our open source products. This is a senior individual contributor role. You'll set direction for your domain, make the calls on priorities and tradeoffs, and be accountable for whether our products deliver for institutions, students, and funders. You'll work closely with educational institutions, Engineering, Data Science, and Implementation, and you'll help raise the bar for product practice across the team.

Core Responsibilities

Strategy and Ownership

• Set the multi-quarter product strategy and roadmap for your domain, and own the tradeoffs: what we build, what we defer, and why. Ground decisions in user evidence, technical dependencies, resourcing, and impact.
• Lead user discovery with users and teams to ground priorities in evidence.
• Own product decisions for your domain with minimal oversight. Escalate only portfolio-level or cross-domain conflicts to the Director.
• Shape product direction with Engineering so architecture choices reflect long-term product vision, scalability, and user needs.
• Turn the institutional needs and implementation challenges raised by partners into a coherent strategic product direction, not a backlog of requests.

Product Delivery

• Define what success looks like for each release and partner with the Technical Project Management function.
• Participate in sprint planning, backlog refinement, and retrospectives to keep the team's work tied to product priorities.
• Work with the Project Management owners to set realistic commitments with partners, and lead conversations with partners and stakeholders when scope or priorities need to change.
• Partner with Design and Engineering to build intuitive experiences for data management and system configuration.
• Define integration requirements with third-party tools.

Measurement and Impact

• Define success metrics for your domain, covering adoption, usage, and impact on student outcomes, and use them to drive roadmap decisions.
• Build reporting that shows value to institutional partners, internal leaders, and funders, including grant reporting.

Leadership and Influence

• Contribute to portfolio strategy with the Director, Product Management, including cross-product initiatives and investment decisions.
• Represent your domain to donors, funders, and partner leadership by presenting progress, impact, and roadmap.
• Align Data Science, Engineering, Implementation, and Program teams around shared priorities, and resolve competing asks among them.
• Coach and mentor peers, and lead improvements to how the product team runs discovery, prioritization, and decision documentation.
• Lead go-to-market readiness for your domain, including documentation, training materials, and partner onboarding.

Qualifications

Required

• Deep alignment with DataKind's mission and values, and demonstrated commitment to educational equity and data-driven social impact
• 6+ years of product management experience with Agile methodologies, including end-to-end ownership of a product line or domain from discovery through launch and scale for enterprise software
• 2+ years of experience with data infrastructure, backend systems, or B2B SaaS platforms, with a solid grasp of data ingestion, ETL, cloud storage, and API design
• Experience in the Edtech or open source space
• Working proficiency with SQL and Git workflows
• A track record of independently setting product strategy and roadmap, and of making scope and sequencing decisions under ambiguity
• Experience influencing senior stakeholders and aligning cross-functional teams without direct authority
• Experience representing a product to external audiences such as partners, customers, or funders
• Experience mentoring other product managers or improving a team's product practices
• A track record of turning requirements from complex, multi-stakeholder environments into clear specs, and of explaining technical concepts to non-technical audiences
• Experience using metrics to drive product decisions and demonstrate impact

Preferred

• Knowledge of data privacy and security requirements, particularly FERPA compliance and student data protection
• Experience with API product management and developer-facing tools
• Background in social impact measurement and working with mission-driven organizations
• Understanding of AI/ML applications in education and student support systems
• Experience working with nonprofit organizations or grant-funded initiatives