Product Manager

Summary

Willow Education is building a career and postsecondary readiness platform that helps schools and community-based organizations support economic mobility. The Product Manager will own product problems end to end, conducting user research, identifying opportunities, designing and testing solutions, and partnering with engineering to deliver polished product experiences. The role emphasizes AI-assisted product development, strong UX design, autonomy, and direct engagement with students and educators.

Responsibilities

• Conduct research with students, educators, counselors, and school leaders
• Identify opportunities to improve existing experiences and build new ones
• Turn ambiguous problems into clear product solutions
• Explore, prototype, and test multiple approaches with real users
• Design polished, production-ready product experiences
• Make decisions about workflows, interaction patterns, information architecture, hierarchy, and usability
• Run product-based experiments to identify opportunities and strengthen outcomes
• Work closely with engineering from early exploration through implementation
• Maintain and improve the consistency, usability, and visual quality of Willow across the product

Skills

• You will be expected to use AI every day to research problems, explore ideas, analyze feedback, design solutions, and build coded prototypes
• You should be comfortable using modern AI development tools to turn ideas into working prototypes that users and teammates can interact with
• You do not need to be a software engineer, but you must be able to work and code with AI for this role
• User research and customer discovery
• Product thinking and problem definition
• UX and interaction design
• Prototyping and usability testing
• Turning complex workflows into simple experiences
• Creating polished product interfaces
• Making good product decisions with incomplete information
• Working directly with engineers
• Taking a product from an ambiguous problem through a shipped solution
• You should have a strong design eye, expertise with driving design decisions, tools, and workflows, and be comfortable owning the quality of the experience yourself
• You should also be comfortable setting your own direction, making big decisions without waiting for permission, and operating in an environment where priorities and plans will change
• You like talking directly to users
• You are comfortable starting with a messy problem rather than a detailed specification
• You want ownership of both what gets built and how it works
• You have strong product and design opinions but change your mind when the evidence says you should
• You care deeply about quality
• You are comfortable moving quickly in ambiguity without layers of approval
• You want your work to visibly shape the direction of an entire product
• Experience working in or closely with American public schools is a significant advantage
• We are especially interested in candidates who have worked as educators, counselors, school leaders, education researchers, edtech product builders, or in other roles that involved meaningful time inside schools

Qualifications

Must Haves

• You will be expected to use AI every day to research problems, explore ideas, analyze feedback, design solutions, and build coded prototypes
• You should be comfortable using modern AI development tools to turn ideas into working prototypes that users and teammates can interact with
• You do not need to be a software engineer, but you must be able to work and code with AI for this role
• User research and customer discovery
• Product thinking and problem definition
• UX and interaction design
• Prototyping and usability testing
• Turning complex workflows into simple experiences
• Creating polished product interfaces
• Making good product decisions with incomplete information
• Working directly with engineers
• Taking a product from an ambiguous problem through a shipped solution
• You should have a strong design eye, expertise with driving design decisions, tools, and workflows, and be comfortable owning the quality of the experience yourself
• You should also be comfortable setting your own direction, making big decisions without waiting for permission, and operating in an environment where priorities and plans will change
• You like talking directly to users
• You are comfortable starting with a messy problem rather than a detailed specification
• You want ownership of both what gets built and how it works
• You have strong product and design opinions but change your mind when the evidence says you should
• You care deeply about quality
• You are comfortable moving quickly in ambiguity without layers of approval
• You want your work to visibly shape the direction of an entire product

Nice to Haves

• Experience working in or closely with American public schools is a significant advantage
• We are especially interested in candidates who have worked as educators, counselors, school leaders, education researchers, edtech product builders, or in other roles that involved meaningful time inside schools

Benefits

• Meaningful benefits
• Equity in a fast-growing mission-driven public benefit corporation