Director of Product Management, Early Childhood & Public Sector Solutions

Job description

Mission Statement & Values: Acelero, Inc. designs and delivers research and evidence-based approaches to eliminate the gaps between young children’s inherent potential and their achievement in school and life. With our partners, we accelerate child and family outcomes that honor the aspirations and cultures of the communities we serve. Our values: Data-Informed Learning; Transparent & Open Communication; Growth Mindset; Championing Equality; Caring Teams & Communities. Our mission is bold: To design and deliver research and evidence-based approaches to eliminate the gaps between young children's inherent potential and their achievement in school and life. With our partners, we accelerate child and family outcomes that honor all of the aspirations and cultures of the communities we serve. Our values: Data-Informed Learning; Transparent & Open Communication; Growth Mindset; Championing Equality; Caring Teams & Communities. Job Summary: The Director of Product Management, Early Childhood & Public Sector is the product owner for Shine’s portfolio of solutions that help state, regional, and local government agencies strengthen early childhood systems. The portfolio includes infrastructure technology and AI-enabled solutions that support how public agencies organize information, coordinate services, make decisions, and improve outcomes for young children and families. This role will turn promising solutions and project-based capabilities into clear, repeatable, and scalable products. The Director will own the product vision and roadmap for the portfolio, make product-level technical architecture, support build, buy, and partner decisions, manage development priorities and the backlog, and establish a transparent prioritization process. The role must balance a reusable product core with the distinct policy, workflow, data, and implementation needs of each public-sector customer. This position will work closely with Public Systems sales and business unit leaders, early childhood subject matter experts, customers, technology and data partners, and external development teams. The ideal candidate combines strong product judgment, technical fluency, customer discovery skills, and commercial orientation, and is comfortable moving between product strategy and hands-on execution. Essential Duties & Responsibilities: Product strategy and productization: Define the product vision, value proposition, target users, core capabilities, and roadmap for the Public Systems portfolio. Convert existing tools, prototypes, and delivery approaches into well-defined products with repeatable functionality, implementation models, documentation, and support requirements. Roadmap, backlog, and prioritization: Own the portfolio roadmap and development backlog from discovery through release. Establish a disciplined, transparent process for evaluating and sequencing work based on customer value, commercial opportunity, strategic fit, technical risk, effort, scalability, and expected impact. Support establishing and applying consistent product development practices across the product team. Technical architecture and platform decisions: Partner with IT and engineering to define requirements for architectural selection, ensuring alignment with enterprise security, API, and platform standards. Lead product-level architecture decisions, including platform approach, data model, integrations and APIs, configurable versus custom capabilities, and build, buy, or partner choices. Partner with IT, engineering, data, and customer-facing teams to ensure solutions are maintainable, interoperable, secure, accessible, and scalable. AI product development: Translate high-value customer problems into responsible AI-enabled capabilities. Define requirements for human oversight, data use, transparency, quality, privacy, and ongoing performance monitoring, in alignment with organizational governance and applicable public-sector requirements. Customer discovery and market insight: Build a continuous understanding of state, regional, and local agency needs through partnership with sales and implementation teams, workflow observation, and market research. Distinguish broadly shared needs from customer-specific requests and use those insights to shape the roadmap. Commercial partnership: Work with Sales and Marketing to define product positioning, packaging, pricing inputs, demonstrations, and sales enablement. Support qualification and solution design for priority opportunities by assessing product fit, technical feasibility, implementation implications, and the path from an initial customer need to a scalable offering. Collaborate with Finance on pricing and discount strategy. Prototyping and pre-sale validation: Conduct rapid prototyping, proof-of-concept development, and user testing when needed to validate demand, demonstrate value, reduce technical uncertainty, or support priority commercial opportunities before full development. Product delivery and lifecycle ownership: Define product requirements, user stories, acceptance criteria, sprint and release planning, quality expectations, launch readiness, release communication, and post-launch learning. Maintain clear decision records, documentation, and visibility into dependencies, risks, and tradeoffs. Customer configuration and scalability: Define product guardrails and configuration patterns that address meaningful differences in customer policies, workflows, data environments, and operating models while limiting unsustainable one-off development. Identify when a customer request should become a core capability, configurable option, professional service, partner integration, or out-of-scope item. Cross-functional implementation partnership: Partner with Public Systems delivery and implementation teams early in the sales and product lifecycle to ensure solutions are feasible, deployable, and supported. Create strong handoffs and feedback loops among Sales, Product, Customer Success, and technical partners. Measurement and continuous improvement: Define product success measures, including adoption, usability, customer outcomes, reliability, implementation time, and reuse across customers. Define product unit economics, target gross margins, cost to serve, and commercial performance in alignment with Finance. Use evidence to improve the product and recommend investment, expansion, consolidation, or retirement decisions. Vendor and partner management: Serve as the primary product counterpart to external engineering teams, technology vendors, and specialized partners. In partnership with Finance and IT, evaluate, select, and manage third-party development vendors within approved budget limits. Establish clear requirements, milestones, quality standards, governance, and accountability for delivery and ongoing maintenance. Contribute to Acelero, Inc. community of practice by: Cross-functional influence: Create alignment among senior leaders and teams with different priorities by making customer evidence, business rationale, technical constraints, and product tradeoffs explicit. Operating discipline: Establish practical product management routines, tools, and decision rights that improve focus, speed, accountability, and transparency across the Public Systems product lifecycle. Community of practice: Demonstrate leadership aligned with the company mission, core values, and commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging; communicate priorities and progress effectively; and promote shared purpose and collaboration. Job Specifications: To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to carry out each essential duty in a satisfactory manner. The job specifications listed are representative of the education and experience, the physical requirements, as well as the knowledge, skill and/or ability (KSAs) that are generally necessary for the role. Reasonable accommodation may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions. Job Requirements & Qualifications: Education: Bachelor’s degree or equivalent combination of education and relevant experience. Product experience: 7+ years of progressive experience in product management, product ownership, or technical product leadership, including ownership of complex digital products from discovery through launch and continuous improvement. Hands-on product execution: Strong command of product discovery, roadmap development, backlog management, requirements and acceptance criteria, agile delivery, release planning, and product analytics. This is a “builder” role with nascent products and requires hands-on execution vs. managing a large team. AI and data products: Experience developing AI-enabled, analytics, workflow, or decision-support products is strongly preferred, including familiarity with responsible AI, public sector regulatory compliance, enterprise data governance, privacy, transparency, and human-centered design. Technical fluency: Demonstrated ability to make or lead product-level technical decisions involving software architecture, data models, APIs and integrations, cloud platforms, security and privacy, and vendor technology. The role does not require day-to-day software engineering, but it does require the ability to engage deeply with technical teams and evaluate trade-offs. Customer and commercial orientation: Demonstrated success translating customer problems and market opportunities into products that customers adopt and fund. Experience supporting complex enterprise or public-sector sales, solution design, pilots, and commercialization is preferred. Public systems context: Experience with government, govtech, edtech, health and human services, or another regulated and data-intensive environment is strongly preferred. Knowledge of early childhood systems, public benefits, education, or human services is a significant plus. Leadership: Ability to lead through influence in a matrixed and lean environment, navigate ambiguity, make clear recommendations, and move effectively between strategic decisions and detailed product work. People management experience is helpful but not required. Communication: Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to translate among customer, policy, business, design, delivery, and technical audiences and to communicate decisions and tradeoffs with clarity. Additional Requirements: Physical exam and background checks are required for this position. Travel required locally or long-distance up to 20% of the time for work-related meetings and functions. Must have a valid driver’s license and/or reliable transportation. Physical Requirements: Ability to sit most of the time with some bending and reaching. Ability to stand, walk, and bend periodically. Ability to engage in repetitive movement of wrists, hands, and fingers – typing and/or writing. Ability to work frequently at close visual range (i.e. preparing and analyzing data and figures, accounting, transcription, computer terminal, extensive reading). Ability to receive and respond to oral communication. Ability to exert up to 10 pounds of force to lift, carry, push, pull, or otherwise move objects. Work Environment: Work is generally performed in a remote environment. Standard office equipment generally used includes: Smartphone/Telephone Personal Computer (monitor, keyboard, and mouse), Laptop, or Tablet May be required to operate a motor vehicle during the course of duties. When, Where, and How Much When: Fall/Winter 2026 Where: Remote (25% Travel) How Much: $110k-$140k/yr Why You’ll Love Working With Us At Shine Early Learning, our mission is bold: to eliminate the gap between children’s inherent potential and their achievement in school and life. With our partners, we accelerate child and family outcomes that honor the aspirations and cultures of the communities we serve. As part of the Strategy & Growth team, you’ll help build the systems and infrastructure that make mission-aligned growth possible. Your work will directly support leaders making decisions that expand access, strengthen partnerships, and increase impact for children and families nationwide. Robust benefits that support your total wellbeing, including: Medical, Dental, and Vision Insurance with multiple plan options to fit your needs Health Savings Account (HSA) with company contributions up to $800 annually Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA) for health and dependent care expenses 401(k) Retirement Plan with up to 4% company match and immediate vesting Company-paid Short-Term and Long-Term Disability and Basic Life Insurance Up to $500 per year in Professional Development Reimbursements Employee Assistance Program (EAP) with counseling and mental wellness support Wellness Programs, including virtual fitness, nutrition, and mindfulness classes Pet Insurance, Legal Assistance, ID Theft Protection, and Employee Discount Perks We are an equal opportunity employer committed to creating a diverse and healthy workplace. We are an equal opportunity employer, committed to creating a diverse and healthy workplace.