Chief Product Officer

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United States.

📋 Description

• Take ownership of SBNC’s product vision and strategy, transforming organizational objectives, student needs, and campus-partner requirements into a prioritized roadmap.

• Align product investments with SBNC’s overall strategy, impact goals, communication efforts, and fundraising priorities.

• Create a consistent process for identifying obstacles to student engagement, prioritizing hypotheses, and selecting interventions for testing.

• Build, recruit, mentor, and develop a streamlined technology team.

• Determine the role of AI within SBNC’s product and assess the effectiveness, accuracy, reliability, bias, and safety of AI-enabled features.

• Conduct qualitative and quantitative research involving students, campus partners, and staff.

• Analyze the reasons why students disengage or face challenges in completing essential actions and prioritize the barriers to address.

• Identify which problems, features, and capabilities campus partners value and might financially support.

• Design lightweight and rapid experiments prior to committing substantial engineering resources.

• Rigorously interpret research findings, product data, and experiment outcomes.

• Establish success metrics and evaluate whether products and changes positively influence student behavior and outcomes.

• Identify and verify problems, define core products and AI-driven capabilities, and successfully launch them to the market.

• Personally draft specifications, review designs, remove obstacles for engineering, and make daily product decisions.

• Prioritize and sequence roadmap tasks while balancing speed, quality, learning, impact, and limited engineering resources.

• Report to the Executive Director and oversee the Founding Engineer along with two additional engineers planned for the future.

⛳️ Requirements

• Commitment to SBNC's mission to assist postsecondary students in connecting with the resources necessary to remain enrolled, complete their education, and establish a foundation for economic mobility.

• Engages students as co-designers and focuses on those experiencing the most significant barriers.

• Resourceful and brings a sense of urgency to eliminating friction between students and the benefits for which they qualify, all while maintaining high standards for quality and follow-through.

• Designs with scalability in mind, prioritizing what is most crucial for future campuses, policy changes, and student challenges.

• Comfortable taking on multiple roles and owning results; possesses a startup mentality.

• Growth-oriented and innovative mindset; actively seeks feedback, shares it transparently, and adjusts accordingly.

• Functional or executive-level leadership experience is required.

• Over 7 years of management experience while being willing and able to engage in individual contributor-level tasks.

• Proven track record of taking products from conception to launch, ideally as an early or founding product leader in a startup or similarly entrepreneurial organization.

• Authentic product research experience, encompassing the design, execution, and synthesis of qualitative and quantitative research and experiments.

• Utilizes evidence to inform roadmap decisions.

• Direct experience in launching AI-enabled product features.

• Background in higher education, government benefits, public-sector technology, or another highly regulated or administratively complex setting.

• Strong product judgment amidst resource limitations.

• Experience creating products for populations navigating complex or high-stakes systems.

• Must reside within the 50 states or the District of Columbia.

• Full authorization to work in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia is required.

• No employment visa sponsorship will be provided.

🏝️ Benefits

• Annual performance bonus of 10%.

• Comprehensive medical insurance (100% Paid Employee Only Coverage, 50% coverage for dependents).

• Flexible Paid Time Off (PTO) after a 90-day introductory period.

• 12 weeks of Paid Parental Leave.

• 11 federally recognized holidays.

• Paid organization-wide office closures: March (1 week); July (1 week); November (1 week); End of year (2 weeks).

• Starter 401(k) retirement plan.

• Stipend for home office setup.

• Fully remote work environment.