Associate Product Manager

We're looking for two early career product managers (either recent graduates or career changers) that will join one of our product pods and support and scale the work of one of our Senior Product Managers. This is an opportunity to join a high-growth, driven, ambitious team.

Core responsibilities will be:

• Triaging incoming tickets from our support and customer success teams
• Creating user stories, development tickets, project managing, and testing enhancements and bug fixes
• Serving as subject matter export for the product area you support- answering questing from customer success managers, sales reps, and others
• Writing documentation, release notes, and other artifacts that will drive understanding and buy-in of internal and external stakeholders

You will also assist a nd support the product and engineering organization in other tasks where we require additional capacity: UI copy writing, quality assurance testing, training support, customer interviews, research, data cleaning and analysis, etc.

At first, having a strong operational command on your responsibilities, aligning with the team's needs and goals, and being able to execute quickly on whatever you're tasked with will be most essential. As you progress, you will take on planning and executing larger epics (projects) and more strategic projects.

Interview process:

• Recorded video interview: Historically top 5-10% of applicants are asked to complete this. Takes 10-15 minutes. We have real humans watch this (CTO, product leadership, hiring manager, and HR team) and we do not use AI to screen. This jus makes it much easier for us to handle from a scheduling logistics perspective. Here's more about our rationale for using this process: https://www.notion.so/schoolinkshome/Why-SchooLinks-starts-with-a-video-screen-03cdb3d60a5549f289aea515ec008004?source=copy_link
• Live interview with product leadership 30-45 min
• Logic Challenge - related to understanding an existing product of ours
• Hiring manager interview - interviewing directly with the PM that you would be reporting to
• Case Study - a couple hours of work and follow up discussion on a made up scenario similar to the challenges that we deal with

Requirements:
Hard requirements:

• Located in and authorized to work in the US (we are not able to provide visa sponsorship at this time)
• Available to work 8:30 CT- 5:30 CT daily - salaried position, we expect you to work at least this much as well as to complete responsibilities for regular and project work that may require you to invest additional time outside of these hours

The candidates most likely to move on in the interview process will be:

• Candidates with 1-2 years of experience in high growth startups, consulting, or finance
• New grads with relevant internships at high growth venture-backed startups or the startup ecosystem
• Candidates who have some technical skills (web development, python, etc)

Top skills required:

Operational skills Manage bugfix and quality situation — you triage and QA hotfixes, use Jira effectively, keep issues flowing. Own rate of SLA completion

Ability to follow directions and align with needs Prioritize projects based on PM and leadership needs. Build trust by proper escalation and validation of your hypotheses when you’re not sure.

Logical thinking Structured thinking, clear steps, MECE, hypothesis generation, use AI the right way

Hunger Are you going to do what it takes to push yourself and others around you? We can’t be telling you to get stuff done, you have to show that you want it. This role is not intended to be easy or long term, it’s meant to be a proving ground

Written and formal communication Jira ticket writing, release note writing, email support and tier 2 escalation

Oral, informal, and conversational communication (listening and conveying information) Slack back and forth, calls with customers (expressing vision and why, making customers feel heard, etc). We need to feel comfortable putting you in front of customers if there are sticky situations

Memory RAM is quite important here- need to have a lot of context for how things work to make connections between different tickets, modules, projects, customers, etc.

Taste and product intuition Do you come up with elegant solutions, even for small scale problems. Can you articulate why and build consensus around that approach?

Software knowledge How does software get built, how much do you know about the craft you’re organizing? Triage and understand root cause of the problem we

Ability to pick up domain knowledge -Take ownership of your owner learning and understanding — structure knowledge clearly

Benefits:
• 100% health care coverage for Employee

• 401K with company matching
• Dental & Vision
• Parental Leave
• Subsidized gym membership
• Remote work stipend
• Annual team offsite