Product Lead, Ventures

Nelnet Business Services (NBS), a division of Nelnet, Inc., provides payment technology, education services, and learning management solutions to education and faith‑based organizations, serving more than 1,300 higher‑education institutions, 11,500 K‑12 schools, 3,500 churches, and millions of individual students, families, and supporters worldwide.

Our culture of service enables us to form long‑lasting and trusted partnerships, while our focus on creativity and innovative solutions empowers customer communities to thrive. As a Nelnet company, the perks at NBS go beyond our benefits package. You’re part of a community, invested in you as an individual and united by our mission to create opportunities for people where they live, learn and work.

As Product Lead in New Ventures, you take validated business cases and own the full product lifecycle from there: break it into jobs to be done, features, and screens; define and prioritize the MVP; hand off to engineering; iterate based on real user feedback; and continue building and maintaining the roadmap until the venture is mature enough to hand to a GM and dedicated team.

You’re effectively the de‑facto product manager for every new venture until it scales. That means you need to be senior enough to set a product vision and detail‑oriented enough to execute it yourself.

• Take a validated problem statement and break it into customer jobs to be done—what users are actually trying to accomplish and where current solutions fall short.
• Conduct solution‑focused research: prototype tests, concept walkthroughs, and usability sessions that answer what to build, not whether to build.
• Translate jobs to be done into individual features, user flows, and screen‑level detail.
• Write crisp product briefs that make the trade‑offs explicit and give the team a clear direction to build toward MVP.

• Define the MVP: the smallest set of features that tests the core value proposition with real users.
• Prioritize the roadmap against customer feedback, technical lead times, and continuous improvement signal—and communicate the logic clearly to stakeholders.
• Set a point of view on what’s in and what’s out at each stage, grounded in evidence.
• Keep the roadmap current; stakeholders should always know where things stand and why.

• Write specs engineers want to read: scoped, opinionated, with clear acceptance criteria and explicit trade‑offs.
• Own the technical handoff—make sure engineering has everything they need to build without coming back for clarification.
• Run the sprint process: planning, stand‑ups, backlog grooming, retrospectives.
• Close the loop on what shipped: feed user feedback and build learnings back into the next iteration cycle.
• Decide what’s worth iterating, what needs to be rebuilt, and what should be cut—and document the reasoning.

• Identify who needs to be involved at each stage of the venture and bring them in at the right moment—not too early to slow things down, not too late to course‑correct.
• Communicate product decisions in writing to audiences ranging from engineers to executives.
• Anchor prioritization conversations in real user signal; make it easy for stakeholders to trust the call even when the answer is no.
• Represent the product perspective across the organization; build credibility by doing the work, not just presenting it.

• Own the product roadmap through scale—continue building, iterating, and maintaining the product until a GM and dedicated team are in place.
• As the de‑facto PM for each venture, hold the product vision and make the day‑to‑day calls that keep the venture moving in the right direction.
• Design the product management processes, templates, and documentation that make this model repeatable: how specs are written, how roadmaps are maintained, how user feedback is captured and acted on.
• When a GM is hired, execute a structured handoff—product vision, roadmap, open decisions, user research, and process documentation—so the incoming team inherits a functioning operation.

Annual compensation range for…