Product Manager

Department: Product Management

Employment Type: Full Time

Location: Remote - USA

Reporting To: Executive Director of Product

The Product Manager owns the health, direction, requirements, readiness, adoption, and measurable outcomes of assigned Summit K12 products across the full product lifecycle. The role combines strong inbound product management with outbound product ownership: understanding customers and markets, setting priorities, defining requirements, partnering closely with Design and Engineering, validating product quality, preparing the organization and customers for successful adoption, and using post-launch evidence to continuously improve the product.

Summit K12 Product Managers are expected to become credible domain experts in the products and customer problems they own. They do not need to enter the role as the deepest subject‑matter expert in every area, but they are expected to build sufficient market, product, workflow, and applicable state or regulatory knowledge to make sound decisions, support expansion into new markets, and represent the product with confidence.

A Product Manager is not a project coordinator, permanent frontline support representative, dedicated QA engineer, or product marketer. PMs own product truth, readiness, prioritization, and outcomes. PjMs drive approved projects through delivery;
Product Operations runs the operating system;
Product Design owns experience design and usability practice;
Engineering owns technical architecture and implementation;
Academic owns academic integrity within its authority; and customer‑facing functions own scaled execution in their disciplines.

• Maintain a current, evidence‑based view of product health across adoption, usage, customer outcomes, support burden, defects, maintenance needs, UX debt, renewal risk, business performance, and strategic fit.
• Own product roadmap and prioritization within approved strategy, balancing maintenance, customer commitments, growth, quality, modernization, and market expansion.
• Make routine product decisions independently within delegated authority and surface keep, improve, consolidate, migrate, or retire recommendations when evidence warrants.
• Own multiple products where scope and complexity permit, using shared systems and clear priorities to avoid administrative sprawl.

• Maintain current representative‑user evidence sufficient to support material product and roadmap decisions; evidence quality matters more than interview quotas.
• Combine customer feedback, workflow observation, analytics, support signals, implementation evidence, commercial context, and competitive/market information into clear problem definitions and product decisions.
• Build and maintain credible domain expertise for assigned products, including relevant educator workflows, implementation realities, state or market requirements, policy/accountability context, and customer expectations where applicable.
• As products expand, distinguish reusable core capabilities from state‑, market‑, or customer‑specific requirements so growth does not create unnecessary one‑off product variants.
• Make explicit what is known, uncertain, assumed, and still needs validation.

• Translate validated problems and business goals into clear outcomes, requirements, acceptance criteria, dependencies, implementation impacts, and success measures before significant work begins.
• Partner continuously with Product Design and Engineering through discovery, refinement, development, demos, tradeoffs, and clarification so teams can move without unnecessary escalation or rework.
• Maintain and prioritize enhancement, defect, and maintenance work based on customer impact, severity, strategic value, product health, and…