Principal Product Manager, Candova

Our mission is to open the door to the life-changing impact of education. We build market-leading, online college credit and test-preparation solutions that help working adults earn their degrees, advance their careers, and achieve economic mobility. Recognized by Fast Company and GSV 150 as one of the world’s most innovative education companies, we are also at the forefront of AI-first learning, combining artificial intelligence with the latest learning science to improve access and outcomes at scale.

Our product is our impact. Through our Keys to College and Keys to the Classroom initiatives, we have saved students over $700 million in tuition and enabled hundreds of thousands of learners to pursue and succeed in careers across nursing, teaching, counseling, business, and other high-demand fields. We are deeply focused on measurable outcomes and building products that create meaningful, lasting change in people’s lives.

We’re looking for an AI-native product leader to build Candova.ai from 0→1 and beyond.

Candova is our new AI-skill development product. Instead of teaching people about AI in the abstract, Cando, Candova’s voice‑led AI trainer, coaches them through real work in their own tools. Companies are buying AI faster than their teams can learn to use it, and we believe whoever closes that gap owns a large, fast-moving market. Candova is a new product with the opportunity to create the product surface, the product roadmap, the pricing, and the best audience fit are all still being decided.

You will drive those decisions.

This is a hands‑on role for someone who builds with AI, and is passionate about solving the hard problems a new product and market present. You will collaborate regularly with executive company leadership to develop this vision into a successful new product. You’ll prototype in a couple days what most teams spend a month specifying. Your customer is small and mid‑sized businesses trying to make their teams AI-native.

Individual professionals upskilling on their own are a secondary audience to grow into once the business motion is working.

• Help shape the Candova product vision, and drive it into what actually gets built.
• Drive the Candova product strategy, roadmap end to end, and product execution from first prototype to a business with repeatable growth.
• Get in front of users and buyers every week, and turn what you hear into shipped product changes in weeks, not quarters.
• Validate pricing, packaging, and positioning for the business motion, and identify the entry point that converts best inside a company, in partnership with marketing, BD and Sales.
• Define the metrics that tell you whether Candova is working: activation, task completion, demonstrated skill, retention, and expansion. Use them to double down or kill fast.
• Understand the competitive landscape: AI-skills platforms, You Tube, webinars, training offered by the LLM providers, and in‑house enablement programs. Identify where we can win and who nobody is serving well yet.

• Build with AI yourself: prototype features, generate and test content, wire up agents, and evaluate models.
• Push the boundary on what an AI‑powered product can do: agentic workflows, personalized coaching, automated evaluation and grading, measurable skill proficiency. Be equally clear‑eyed about where the technology isn’t ready.
• Solve for curriculum that stays current as the tools shift underneath it. The major LLMs ship new capabilities every few weeks, which makes staying current an AI generation problem, not just a content one.
• Treat AI quality as a…