Product Manager

The Product Manager owns the health, direction, requirements, readiness, adoption, and measurable outcomes of assigned Summit K12 products across the full product lifecycle. The role combines strong inbound product management with outbound product ownership: understanding customers and markets, setting priorities, defining requirements, partnering closely with Design and Engineering, validating product quality, preparing the organization and customers for successful adoption, and using post-launch evidence to continuously improve the product.

Summit K12 Product Managers are expected to become credible domain experts in the products and customer problems they own. They do not need to enter the role as the deepest subject-matter expert in every area, but they are expected to build sufficient market, product, workflow, and applicable state or regulatory knowledge to make sound decisions, support expansion into new markets, and represent the product with confidence.

A Product Manager is not a project coordinator, permanent frontline support representative, dedicated QA engineer, or product marketer. PMs own product truth, readiness, prioritization, and outcomes. PjMs drive approved projects through delivery; Product Operations runs the operating system; Product Design owns experience design and usability practice; Engineering owns technical architecture and implementation; Academic owns academic integrity within its authority; and customer-facing functions own scaled execution in their disciplines.

1. Own the Product

• Maintain a current, evidence-based view of product health across adoption, usage, customer outcomes, support burden, defects, maintenance needs, UX debt, renewal risk, business performance, and strategic fit.
• Own product roadmap and prioritization within approved strategy, balancing maintenance, customer commitments, growth, quality, modernization, and market expansion.
• Make routine product decisions independently within delegated authority and surface keep, improve, consolidate, migrate, or retire recommendations when evidence warrants.
• Own multiple products where scope and complexity permit, using shared systems and clear priorities to avoid administrative sprawl.

2. Know the Customer, Market & Domain

• Maintain current representative-user evidence sufficient to support material product and roadmap decisions; evidence quality matters more than interview quotas.
• Combine customer feedback, workflow observation, analytics, support signals, implementation evidence, commercial context, and competitive/market information into clear problem definitions and product decisions.
• Build and maintain credible domain expertise for assigned products, including relevant educator workflows, implementation realities, state or market requirements, policy/accountability context, and customer expectations where applicable.
• As products expand, distinguish reusable core capabilities from state-, market-, or customer-specific requirements so growth does not create unnecessary one-off product variants.
• Make explicit what is known, uncertain, assumed, and still needs validation.

3. Build the Right Product

• Translate validated problems and business goals into clear outcomes, requirements, acceptance criteria, dependencies, implementation impacts, and success measures before significant work begins.
• Partner continuously with Product Design and Engineering through discovery, refinement, development, demos, tradeoffs, and clarification so teams can move without unnecessary escalation or rework.
• Maintain and prioritize enhancement, defect, and maintenance work based on customer impact, severity, strategic value, product health, and available capacity.
• Act as the Product SME through QA and release gates: validate intended product behavior, workflows, logic, reporting, calculations, and requirements; clarify expected behavior for Engineering and QA; and determine Product readiness within delegated authority.
• Use shared capabilities and established patterns before requesting one-off solutions.

4. Make the Product Successful

• Own the product sales enablement and training plan, demonstrations, guidance, current materials and effectiveness needed for successful launch and adoption.
• Personally demonstrate and deliver key product training when needed; build repeatable materials and train-the-trainer capability with Sales, Marketing, PD and CS for scaled delivery.
• Serve as an expert product escalation resource for customer-facing teams while avoiding permanent dependency on the PM for routine frontline support.
• Partner with Design, Engineering, Academic/Curriculum, PjM, Product Ops, Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, Implementation, and Support on launch and release readiness while preserving clear decision ownership.
• Validate working product against intended outcomes and representative-user evidence before product acceptance.

5. Own Adoption, Outcomes & Continuous Improvement

• Measure post-launch adoption, quality, customer impact, implementation friction, support burden, retention signals, and unintended consequences; convert learning into roadmap action.
• Understand how assigned products contribute to customer value, retention, growth, market expansion, cost-to-serve, and competitive position.
• Gather and validate customer feedback, prioritize action, communicate decisions back to customers and internal teams, and verify improvements. Address recurring issues through root-cause product decisions and reusable guidance.

6. Increase Product Leverage

• Use Product Operations, PjM support, reusable systems, templates, automation, and AI to increase the scope that can be responsibly owned without reducing decision or evidence quality.
• Use AI for research synthesis, analysis, requirements drafting, competitive/market synthesis, product monitoring, documentation, enablement drafting, and prototype support where reliable; verify outputs against source evidence and retain accountable product judgment.
• Contribute reusable product patterns, evidence, requirements practices, enablement approaches, prompts, and learnings back to the Product organization.

Definition of Success

Assigned products have clear direction, current customer and market evidence, visible health, strong requirements, reliable Product acceptance, effective enablement, measurable adoption, and improving outcomes. The PM can represent the product credibly across Engineering, customers, implementation, support, and go-to-market teams; routine decisions move without unnecessary escalation; and the PM’s product span can grow because systems, reusable enablement, and strong judgment replace coordination overhead.

Required

• Demonstrated ability to translate customer problems and business goals into clear decisions, requirements, and measurable outcomes.
• Strong written and verbal communication, prioritization, cross-functional judgment, and ability to operate with clear decision rights.
• Ability to use customer evidence, product data, support signals, delivery information, and business context to make sound tradeoffs.
• Ability and willingness to develop credible domain expertise and represent assigned products in customer-facing, internal enablement, and cross-functional settings.
• Ability to partner effectively with Engineering through enhancement, defect, QA, acceptance, and release decisions without taking over technical ownership.
• Practical fluency with AI-assisted research, analysis, documentation, prototyping, or workflow automation while retaining human judgment and accountability.
• 4+ years of product-management or closely related digital-product ownership experience, or equivalent demonstrated scope and capability.

Preferred

• K-12 EdTech, SaaS, curriculum, assessment, analytics, multilingual learner, compliance/accountability, or complex workflow experience.
• Experience supporting product launch, implementation, enablement, training, or customer adoption.