Associate Product Manager
At InStride, we’re pioneering a new approach to workforce education. Our mission is to enable employers to provide life-changing education to their employees in partnership with the highest-quality global academic institutions. We unlock business and social impact to transform companies and people for the future.
We believe that a company’s richest resource is their employees, and that investments in people yield the highest returns for individuals, businesses, and society as a whole. That’s why every InStride employee is eligible to enroll in 1,700+ online certificate and degree programs through our Step Forward program. Unlike traditional tuition reimbursement programs, InStride covers your tuition upfront, regardless of your course of study, degree type, or school. The Step Forward program, along with InStride’s best-in-class employee benefits, are available to all employees from the day they join InStride.
Read further to see how you can be part of the movement to drive businesses and society forward through life-changing, best-in-class workforce education.
Role Overview
At InStride, the Associate Product Manager will play a key role in further defining and developing our platform to create amazing user experiences for our corporate partners and their employees. The ideal candidate is a self-starter who wants to grow and evolve a product that can help change the lives of our users.
High-Level Responsibilities
- Feature discovery: You want to really understand the challenges that the customer is facing and find ways to iterate on research to get to a feature MVP
- Specs & Stories: You write specifications and user stories to help the tech team understand what problem we are trying to tackle, so they can build it
- Sprints: You love being in the nitty-gritty of a regular cadence of sprints, leading a tech pod to consistently deliver new features sprint after sprint
- Prioritization: You excel at prioritizing and grooming a backlog, making sure that there is cross-functional alignment on what’s prioritized next
- Ownership and accountability: You are accountable for a tech pod and for executing on a plan to consistently deliver value to our users
What You'll Actually Do
- Coordinate and perform requirements gathering between Design, Engineering and additional teams in order to define user stories, acceptance criteria based on the direction for product features
- Lead a team of engineers through backlog grooming, development estimations, sprint planning, and ongoing development to ensure each sprint moves forward at its best velocity
- Support the release of feature launches with cross-functional alignment, user acceptance testing and communication notes to all partners
- Review and prioritize feature/bug requests from internal and external partners
- Analyze business data to identify insights, trends and develop recommendations in order to enable us to make data-driven decisions
- Drive post-launch product optimization opportunities to increase conversion rates
Ideal Profile
- 2+ years in product management or similar positions
- Bachelor’s degree or equivalent relevant work experience
- Track record of success in the full lifecycle of product management from feature discovery through launch
- Knowledge of agile software development practices and experience crafting epics, user stories and organizing in Jira
- Experience in balancing priorities and timelines across multiple partners
- Strong ability to communicate and collaborate with Engineering, Design, Marketing and Business teams using storytelling, data, visualizations and/or examples
- Possesses the ability to zoom in and out between the “big picture” strategy and the high attention to detail tasks
- Experienced with analytics and performance monitoring tools such as Google Analytics, Tableau and/or Google Data Studio
- Excited by the challenge of building a world-class business that delivers not only high revenue growth and compelling return on investment, but also has a meaningful impact on society
- High EQ, comfort with ambiguity and a “no job too small” startup mentality
InStride is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based upon race, ethnicity, religious creed, color, national origin, ancestry, gender (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, marital status, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, medical condition, or any other category protected by applicable federal and state law, including the City of Los Angeles’ Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance relating to an applicant's criminal history.
We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided a reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform crucial job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please discuss your requested accommodation with our HRBP.
Effective November 1, 2021, all new hires must be fully vaccinated against the COVID-19 virus unless they have been granted a reasonable accommodation. If you are offered employment, this requirement must be met by your date of hire, unless a reasonable accommodation is approved by the People & Talent team in writing.
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