About Riverside Insights
At Riverside Insights, we believe no student should go overlooked or underserved. Our mission is to expand opportunity for all learners by building the world’s highest-performing, double bottom line education company. We create assessment and data solutions that help every student be seen, understood, and supported.
About DESSA
DESSA is a leading K–12 mental health, behavior, and social-emotional learning solution that is evolving into the life skills and whole learner space as the category matures. Districts rely on DESSA to identify needs, personalize supports, and measure student growth across resilience, collaboration, and other essential competencies for life and learning.
The next chapter is significant: new markets, new products, new positioning, and new levels of adoption. We are searching for an entrepreneurial product leader who can help us unlock that next chapter.
If you are energized by building what is next and passionate about helping every student thrive, we would love to meet you.
The Opportunity
We’re hiring a Director of Product, DESSA with the mindset of a true Product GM - someone who blends strong product intuition, commercial acumen, and a deep understanding of early childhood education. In this role, you’ll own the end-to-end strategy, roadmap, pricing, and execution for your product line, collaborating across Product, Engineering, Sales, Marketing, and Research to deliver measurable outcomes for teachers and learners.
This is a high-visibility, high-impact leadership role - a key driver of Riverside’s next chapter of growth and innovation.
What You’ll Do
- Define and own DESSA’s multi-year growth strategy and roadmap
- Expand TAM, adoption, and impact across states, districts, and classrooms
- Refine pricing, packaging, and positioning that maximize value
- Translate strategy into clear product requirements for engineering
- Partner with engineering to ensure predictable delivery and technical quality
- Align with Sales and Marketing on launch, messaging, and adoption plays
- Embed educator and district insight into product decisions
- Pilot, measure, and scale what works
- Build partnerships that unlock new channels and influence
- Serve as a credible external voice in all communities
- Track metrics that drive sustainable business and student impact
Success Looks Like
In three years, you will have:
- Doubled DESSA’s revenue through a clear growth strategy and successful product evolution
- Positioned DESSA as the leading life skills solution that resonates nationally
- Delivered roadmap initiatives that improve engagement, fidelity, and ROI for districts
- Created a repeatable GTM motion that scales adoption and expansion
- Built real excitement and advocacy among educators, district leaders, and influencers
Requirements
Who You Are
A successful candidate will excel in the following areas:
Strategic and Commercial Leader
- Knows how to expand reach, usage, revenue, and brand
- Makes savvy tradeoffs that drive both short- and long-term growth
- Partners closely with Sales and Marketing to ensure GTM effectiveness and adoption
Product and Market Expert
- Experience in K–12, assessment, SEL/MTSS, or related domains strongly preferred
- Comfort navigating the evolving SEL to life skills positioning
Cross Functional Driver
- Skilled at influencing without authority and managing a matrix to outcomes
- Thrives in ambiguity; creates order, movement, and accountability
SaaS Builder
- Adept at turning customer insights into scalable, technically feasible solutions
- Skilled in prioritization, technical tradeoffs, and sequencing to accelerate delivery
Market Facing Evangelist
- Confident being the face of DESSA at conferences, with districts, and in the press
- Understands the political nuances across regions and adapts messaging appropriately
Entrepreneurial Owner
- Scrappy, urgent, resourceful; willing to build the pitch, make the call, test the idea
- Strong judgment under pressure; hungry to win
What You’ll Bring:
- Builder energy: you move quickly, remove barriers, and create clarity
- Strategic discipline: you focus on the levers that drive adoption and market expansion
- Teacher-centric empathy: you understand classroom workflows and how teachers think, purchase, and share
- Owner mindset: you are accountable for measurable business outcomes
Benefits
- Medical, Dental, and Vision plans
- Company paid basic life and AD&D insurance
- Company paid long-term disability
- Paid Parental Leave
- Supplemental life insurance options
- Company paid Employee Assistance Program (EAP)
- Retirement plan with discretionary company matching
- Flexible Spending Account (FSA) and Health Savings Account (HSA) options
- Premium subscription to Calm for employee and dependents
- 33 days of company paid time off (PTO, Holidays, Wellness Days)
- Quarterly Focus Days
- Flexible work arrangements
- Tuition Reimbursement Program
- Company orientation and 30/60/90 Day Onboarding
Compensation: A reasonable estimate of the OTE range for this position is $170,000 - $220,000 USD (base plus bonus). This compensation range is specific to the United States, and it incorporates many factors including but not limited to an applicant's skills and prior relevant experience and training; licensures, degrees, and certifications; internal pay ranges; and market data/range parameters.
Top Skills
What We Do
ssessments play a critical role in unlocking a person’s true potential. Actionable insights — derived from accurate, reliable and consistent data — create opportunities that help people thrive.
Through our proven portfolio of trusted and precise assessment solutions, Riverside Insights offers the clarity and perspective needed to create a meaningful impact at the state, district and individual levels. We're dedicated to creating and providing a broad range of high-quality, time-tested professional testing products and services as well as delivering meaningful information that can enhance the lives of children and adults.
At Riverside Insights, we are fueled by a powerful mission: to provide insights that help elevate potential. This stems from a core belief that every person should have the ability to understand their potential and be guided to the resources that enables them to realize that potential.
We aspire to enrich 1B lives globally by 2030 by providing insights born of research-based assessments to students, clinical patients, and employees/companies.
Elevating potential is what we do… and for over 80 years, developing and providing research-based assessments has been how we do it. Riverside is one of the preeminent and most longstanding assessment developers/publishers nationally.
Riverside is a “purpose-fueled, values-led” company that is aligned behind a “PeopleFirst” ethos and a set of 5 very important core values that guide who we work with, how we make decisions, and the standard that we hold ourselves to.
Riverside Insights strives for excellence. We recognize that we must have the best people, and the best people are drawn from the broadest pool of applicants. The people we need can be found only by looking across the full spectrum of race, color, religion, creed, sex, age, national origin, citizenship status, disability, qualified veteran status, genetic information, marital status, sexual orientation and gender identity.
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