Senior Product Manager (Avela.org)

COMPANY

Avela is a Nobel Prize-winning, venture backed, seed-stage edtech/govtech startup focused on increasing access to high quality education with the first common application system for PK-12. We work with cities, school districts, and nonprofits to set up one-stop-shop enrollment hubs for families to find, navigate, and register for childcare, schools, summer camps, athletics, and other education, government, and social programs. We've raised $6.4m from investors including Learn, Schmidt Futures, Ulu, Cherubic, and Urban Innovation Fund and are ~25 employees. We offer a fantastic, mission-driven work culture centered around two hubs (San Francisco and Boston), with a flexible, semi-remote approach.

ROLE

We’re looking for a Senior Product Manager to work alongside our design and engineering teams to bring the most impact to our customers and parents in enrollment. You’ll work with our customers including district administrators, school and city staff, and parents to translate insights into a product that helps families get into education programs while saving time and money.

This is a high-ownership role: you'll help define the roadmap, write the specs, ship the features, and measure the impact—all while building the systems and processes that help Avela scale. If you thrive in an environment translating ambiguity to action, love talking to customers, and impacting millions of parents and students, let’s talk.

RESPONSIBILITIES AND TASKS

• Customer Discovery: Learn, analyze, and understand customer pain points, product usage, and gaps to best represent product direction.
• Product Strategy & Roadmap: Define and own product vision for product areas, prioritize and translate vision into objectives, metrics, and features.
• End to End Feature Ownership: Take features from initial idea through launch. Design complete solutions, iterate and sequence different versions, and cross functionally work with engineering, design, marketing, client services to deliver and market.
• Technical and Go To Market Collaboration: Partner with engineering, design, go to market and client teams to design, deliver, and launch product features. Navigate tradeoffs and timelines across teams and customer deliverables.
• Stakeholder Management and Communication: Communicate proactively priorities, feature solutions, timelines, and changes while building trust across the organization.

Discovery & Research

• Conduct customer interviews to understand unmet pain points
• Complete competitive landscape research to articulate gaps in Avela capabilities compared to competitors
• Synthesize feedback and clearly articulate problem statements to help generate ideas for solutioning

Product Planning & Execution

• Write succinct and thorough PRDs that include problem statement, requirements, edge cases, success metrics and acceptance criteria.
• Sequence iterations of features into MVP and subsequent versions that incrementally deliver value
• Assess product tradeoffs and priorities in technical conversations
• Lead regular stakeholder meetings like bug triage and release planning

Documentation and Training

• Write and maintain succinct and thorough PRDs
• Write release notes and announcements
• Write outward facing product documentation and blog articles

Customer Engagement & Voice of Customer

• Listen to customer pain points and feedback and bring perspectives into solutioning
• Participate in troubleshooting and customer support for escalations of critical issues
• Share feature and roadmap updates with customers in a co-creative spirit

Role Qualifications

• You have 5+ years of product management experience, with at least 2 in B2B SAAS
• You can point to specific features or solutions you shipped that moved metrics.
• You have experience and continued curiosity using AI tools to accelerate research, prototyping, and documentation while still maintaining quality output.
• You’ve worked on small teams where you had to make just enough process to get the job done.
• You’re good at thinking through entire workflows, future proofing the concept while maintaining a MVP that delivers value.
• You can think through hard trade offs between MVP, follow on versions and edge cases, especially in an Edtech environment.
• You can write clearly and explain things simply. You can pivot to talk about technical trade-offs with engineers, problems with customers, and summarize well. Your PRDs are clear enough that someone could start building.
• You can wear multiple hats and shift as priorities change. If there’s a problem, you fix it and don’t wait for someone else to do it.
• Legal ability to work in the US without visa sponsorship
• Former Edtech or Govtech experience a plus
• Former startup experience a plus
• Travel 10% of the time including conferences and company offsites.
• Located in one of our two hubs: San Francisco and Greater Boston

LOCATION

We’d like to ensure colleagues have an opportunity to connect with each other regularly, and that teams have a few days to work together onsite each month. So we are only hiring candidates who live within one of our two hubs:

• San Francisco Bay Area - Office Downtown SOMA, San Francisco, CA
• Greater Boston - Office in Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA

Outside of our occasional collaboration and social gatherings, we offer a flexible, work-from-home culture. We trust our employees to work from wherever they are most productive and comfortable for most of the time, as long as it is private with high speed internet. We hope this offers the best of both worlds - the flexibility to work remotely most of the time (far more than a hybrid model), but still the benefits of in-person collaboration and socialization. More information is available on our hub coworking model at avela.org/hubs. 

COMPENSATION

Target total cash compensation is $130,000–$180,000, structured as a combination of base salary and performance bonus, plus a meaningful stock option grant.

Compensation will be commensurate with relevant experience.

BENEFITS

We love our team and care about their wellness. We strive to offer the best benefits of our peers, including:

-- Significant equity

-- Flexible vacation

-- Home office stipend

-- 401(k) program

-- Flexible Savings Account (FSA)

-- Dependent Care Saving Plan (DCFSA)

-- Commuter Benefits

-- Life Insurance (covered 100%)

-- Premium Medical Plan (Employees covered 100%)

-- Premium Dental Plan (Employees covered 100%)

-- Premium Vision Plan (Employees covered 100%)

-- Paid Family and Medical Leave

-- Free Talkspace access

-- Free access to Health Advocate for health care navigation support

-- Free One Medical membership

-- Free Teladoc membership

-- Discounted Kindbody services (gynecology, fertility, and family-building care)

Learn more at avela.org/careers.