Senior Product Manager

Polygence overview

High school students spend over 4,000 hours being lectured at, despite overwhelming evidence that students learn best through project-based learning. Polygence is an online marketplace for intellectual passion projects that was built with a singular focus on helping students rediscover the joy of learning through personalized projects supervised by academic mentors.

Polygence’s rapid growth has been driven by a top-notch team of entrepreneurs, engineers, researchers and educators united by an uncompromising mission to reshape education around the globe by making it project-focused. At Polygence, the ultimate surge of adrenaline comes from hearing our students rave about their learning experience and describe its life-changing impact.

Position Overview

As a Product Manager at Polygence, reporting to the VP of Product, you will contribute your world-class Product skills to deliver thoughtful product experiences that delight users. You will take complex and potentially intimidating human interactions and make them simple, fun and engaging. You will investigate & use data to understand our customers. And you will constantly collaborate with leaders across the organization, including Design, Product, Marketing, and Ops.

We are a start-up, which means we move fast. But we also adhere to solid design practices and principles in our work. We are remote, which means we articulate and document our thought processes and decisions in a supportive and collaborative environment. Our growing dev team is amazing, you’ll love working in our agile environment. And they will love working with you.

Job Description

In this role you will lead product development efforts that deliver value to our customers. You will collaborate with our talented engineering team every day to build beautiful products that our customers love. Polygence Product Managers understand that the product isn’t just the product, so work cross-functionally across the organization to drive full experiences for our customers. Your leadership, vision, and ability to inspire a team will be key to your success.

Who you are

• Relentless desire to understand customers
• Saying you have a passion for great products is an understatement
• Your decisions are driven by data, but you have the confidence to make smart bets in its absence
• Attitude of empowerment and a passion for helping teams and individuals achieve self-organization
• Natural talent for mediating competing interests and finding creative solutions
• Track record of working with engineering and design teams: people want to work with you again!

What you’ll do

• Develop product strategy and roadmaps for one of our products with a cross-functional team of engineers, designers, marketers, accounts teams, and customer support.
• Become an expert on our customers to inform your prioritization and design of features.
• Drive superb execution at a sustainable pace, anticipating staffing needs, risks, and the need for frequent and clear communication internally and with customers.
• Close the loop on feature development to ensure customer value is actually realized.
• Actively work to build an environment that supports every person bringing their best self to work.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree. MBA preferred.
• Well versed in the theory and practice of Agile, Scrum, and Kanban.
• Have applied knowledge of tools and techniques like User Stories, Human-centered design, test-first development, Continuous Integration, Continuous Testing, Automated Testing.
• Professional experience as a Product Manager for multiple teams, for multiple products, including at least one B2C product.
• Have built a product, delivered it to customers, and supported it in production.
• Experience working with pre-college students is a plus, not a requirement.

You’ll thrive in this role, if you can think fast and slow. If you excel with autonomy. If you are not intimidated by ambiguity. Appreciate the challenges that come with a seed-stage startup. If you like the rapid feedback loop of delivering directly to customers every week. If you enjoy working with a smart and collaborative team.

Benefits… 

Health

• Medical:  Aetna PPO & Kaiser HMO 
• Dental: Guardian 
• Vision: Guardian 

Time Off

• Employees work directly with their manager to schedule time off as needed
• 11 scheduled holidays 

Finances 

• 401K
• Employee Referral Program