Product Manager, Service Experience Platform

Job description

Be the one who makes a difference! At Vertex Education we are a team of high achievers, courageous leaders, and passionate believers in changing lives through education. As a purpose-led education services provider, our mission is destined to benefit many and yet it starts with just one person inspired to work together with us to make a memorable and meaningful difference for our clients, schools, students, and communities. Be the one who makes a difference—with us. We are seeking a Product Manager to champion the school client experience for our Vertex Hub—the centralized digital platform through which schools engage with our services. In this ground-floor role, you will create clarity from ambiguity, translating diverse stakeholder needs into a focused, executable roadmap grounded in data and a relentless commitment to user experience. Success in this role requires balancing cross-functional priorities while protecting a simple, intuitive client experience. You will work closely with service line leaders and executive stakeholders to ensure alignment, while building the delivery discipline necessary to ship meaningful value at a sustainable pace. This is a hands-on role for a builder who thrives on transforming competing priorities into a predictable plan that improves how we serve schools. About the Vertex Hub: The Vertex Hub is our centralized digital platform designed to serve as the primary engagement channel between schools and Vertex service teams. It consolidates service requests, workflows, communication, and visibility into a single, unified experience. The platform spans multiple service lines and is expected to support significant transaction volume across schools. Because the Hub sits at the intersection of operations, technology, and client experience, product decisions require close alignment with service leaders and executive stakeholders. This role translates cross-functional priorities into a focused roadmap while ensuring the end-user experience remains simple, intuitive, and high-value. ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS: 1. Product Definition & Client Advocacy: Translate stakeholder needs, client feedback, and user analytics into clear feature requirements, user stories, and acceptance criteria. Champion a user-centric approach by creating wireframes and prototypes to validate design concepts with clients and internal teams. Act as the voice of the school client, grounding prioritization decisions in user value and experience simplicity. Maintain clear product documentation, including feature specifications and process flows, ensuring a reliable source of truth. 2. Roadmap & Backlog Management: Develop and maintain the product roadmap, managing the intake and prioritization of feature requests from multiple service lines. Facilitate prioritization meetings with service leaders, using objective scoring models to build consensus and align the backlog with strategic goals. Manage the sprint planning process, ensuring the team has a clear and committed set of priorities and a well-groomed backlog for each development cycle. Prepare and present roadmap updates and scope change proposals to leadership, clearly articulating the rationale to secure required approvals. 3. Execution Discipline & Delivery Systems: Design and refine the operating system that moves ideas from request to shipped value, preventing reactive fire-drills and protecting team focus. Establish lightweight but disciplined intake, discovery, sprint, and release practices that create clarity without unnecessary bureaucracy. Lead sprint planning, reviews, and retrospectives with a focus on throughput, dependency management, and continuous improvement. Break large initiatives into shippable increments that allow early value delivery and rapid learning. Leverage generative AI tools to accelerate creation of user stories, acceptance criteria, and related artifacts. 4. Stakeholder Communication & Change Management: Serve as the primary point of contact for internal service teams regarding platform capabilities, feature requests, and release timelines. Develop and execute communication plans for all platform updates, ensuring stakeholders are informed of progress, changes, and user impact. Partner with service leaders to create training materials and lead change management efforts that drive successful adoption of new features by internal teams. Act as the primary contact for external technology vendors and integration partners, managing relationships and technical requirements for the platform. KNOWLEDGE, SKILLS & ABILITIES: Required: Proven experience in a product management role, taking software features from concept to launch. Demonstrated ability to champion the end-user, using client feedback, user research, and data to inform product decisions. Experience defining and implementing product development processes, including feature intake, prioritization, and backlog management. Strong facilitation skills with experience managing requirements and competing priorities from multiple senior stakeholders. Hands-on experience managing product backlogs and writing user stories in a project management tool like Asana or Jira. Practical fluency using generative AI tools to accelerate the creation of product artifacts like user stories and acceptance criteria. Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to articulate the 'why' behind product decisions to a variety of audiences. Preferred: Experience working on B2B software, internal tools, or client-facing service platforms. Direct experience leading change management initiatives to drive adoption of new software and processes with internal teams. Familiarity with user analytics and prototyping tools such as FullStory and Figma. Experience building product management practices from an early stage in a new team or startup environment. Experience serving as a point of contact for external technology vendors or integration partners. Be excited to be a part of our team and grow your career with us! ​ Be the one who enables us to positively impact over 258,000 students across multiple states while driving our growth forward so we can enrich even more lives. Be the one who helps us achieve excellence for over 226 schools that we support with academics, finance, technology, human resources, communications, marketing, facilities, construction, and food services. Be the one who is a diverse thinker, a team player, a smart risk taker, an innovator, and a difference maker by encouraging others to climb higher and reach farther to further education. Be yourself surrounded by wonderful people who care about you, value your unique skills, and lift you up. Be supported in your work by caring leaders and team members who want you to succeed. Be empowered to make a difference and climb higher and reach farther to change lives through education. Be well in all aspects of your life from your physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing to your finances. Enjoy industry-leading pay, rewards, referral bonuses, with unlimited flexible paid time-off for performance. Be able to care for your health and your family with comprehensive medical, dental and vision benefits and invest in your future with 401(k) plans with a 6% employer match on your contributions. Enhance your growth and development with mentoring and money to take training classes. Thrive in a welcoming, supportive, and inclusive environment where we treat others with fairness and respect, celebrate diversity, and elevate equality and inclusion as an equal opportunity employer. Be the one who makes a difference! With an innovative mind, a hungry heart, and engaging spirit you can change lives through education. Be a part of Vertex Education and let’s make a difference together. Apply Today!