Newsela is an Instructional Content Platform that combines engaging, leveled content with integrated formative assessments and insights to supercharge engagement and learning in every subject. Students and teachers use Newsela to find digital content from hundreds of the best sources—from National Geographic to NASA, Biography.com to Encyclopedia Britannica, the Washington Post to the Wichita Eagle. Content is instructionalized to meet students where they are, with interactive tools and analytics to take them where they want to go. Newsela has become an essential solution for schools and districts, with a presence in over 90% of U.S. K-12 schools. Newsela is the content platform for the connected classroom.

We’re looking for an amazing Product Manager to lead the development of our content discovery across our web and mobile products. If you’re interested in doing for student reading engagement what Amazon did for ecommerce, Spotify has done for streaming audio content, and Netflix is doing for streaming video content, this is your opportunity.

Your goal will be to save teachers and students time by providing just-right recommendations on which articles and text sets teachers should assign next and what students should read next. You will have at your disposal (1) a fast-growing library of thousands of high-interest, accessible articles; (2) more than a million registered teachers and and more than ten million registered students who want to spend their time reading and teaching, not searching; and (3) world class engineering, data science and design teams.

Responsibilities

• Lead product vision for our teacher platforms and represent the voice of K-12 teachers on a team that is responsible for achieving unprecedented levels of user engagement within Newsela.
• Establish short- and long-term product goals and strategies.
• Lead an autonomous team devoted to designing, building, and maintaining components of the Newsela website and mobile apps that specifically focus on increasing user engagement and learning.
• Engage closely with our creative team and software engineers to help determine the best design and technical implementation methods and reasonable execution schedules.
• Understand and analyze user needs and conduct research on markets and competitors.
• Build and manage a product roadmap to support our goals and strategies.
• Initiate and prioritize projects, track product development, and partner with the product marketing team to develop product launch plans.
• Translate ambiguous problems into structured recommendations and clear product vision through strategic thinking, data analysis, and an insightful understanding of our customers.
• Optimize current and build new discovery mechanisms to maximize relevance and connect teachers and students with the most impactful content.

The Ideal Candidate

• 2+ years of product management or product design experience at a consumer technology or media company.
• Strong analytical skills and supporting technical skills
• Demonstrated record of success in establishing recommendation product vision and strategy and leading implementation teams, resulting in measurable real world impact.
• Experience in developing Internet products and technologies.

A Few Plusses

• BA/BS in Computer Science or a related technical field.
• A passion for education.
• Strong quantitative analytical ability and excellent written and oral communication skills.
• Comfortable in a fast-paced, entrepreneurial, start-up environment.

Newsela is strongly committed to the principle of equal opportunity for all individuals. Newsela will make all employment decisions without unlawful discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other status protected by law.