Director of Digital Product Management - Internal Tour Operations Platform

• Full time
• EF Educational Tours
• Director

About This Role

We're modernizing the technology platform that powers how our group travel operations teams assemble and produce tours globally. Today, our Operations teams use a combination of a legacy platform, Salesforce, Power BI reports, sophisticated Excel spreadsheets, and AI assistants to bring together the many pieces that shape the traveler experience on tour. Our vision is to bring this capability and more into a unified platform that removes friction and unnecessary manual work, enabling Operations to focus on creating the best possible customer experience within our quality standards and budget.

The bulk of the replatforming work - moving off legacy and consolidating systems - spans the next 3-4 years, with full migration targeted by 2030. After that phase completes, your focus on modernization shifts to maturation and continuous capability development. This is a strategic platform role with staying power. Success means you've built something stable enough that your team can focus on evolving the product with the business and technology rather than managing migration risk.

The platform spans multiple critical Operations workflows, interconnected systems, and stakeholder groups across several business units. As the product leader for the platform, you hold the product frame and build the vision and direction in partnership with Operations leaders, frontline users, Engineering, UX, and other accountable stakeholders. Because this is an internal platform of significant scale and complexity, success depends on shared ownership with the leaders whose teams, processes, and outcomes are affected.

You create the conditions for informed decisions and durable commitment by defining problems precisely, developing options, surfacing tradeoffs clearly, and making a strong product recommendation that stakeholders can evaluate and support. You bring a clear point of view and guide the right stakeholders toward a path forward.

This is a player-coach role. You won't just set direction- you'll roll up your sleeves on execution, balancing hands-on product work with building leverage through your team, peers, and business partners.

Core Responsibilities:

Frame the problem precisely. Work directly with Operations teams to understand what the real friction is in their work versus what they've normalized. Leverage PM frameworks to define what we're solving, for whom, under what constraints—and articulate what a piece of work enables:
Stronger decision-making? Fewer errors? Reduced manual work? Better customer experience? This clarity grounds engineering estimates, design decisions, success measures, and stakeholder expectations.

Navigate organizational risk. Modernization can sometimes challenge users’ expertise, informal workarounds they've built, and ways of working they understand. Read what's driving resistance: is it legitimate concern about transition difficulty or data loss, or are people resisting change because the current system works for them (even if inefficiently)? Articulate that clearly so the team can design a solution that transcends this resistance and the transformation lead can approach adoption thoughtfully.

Articulate and compel the vision. Help people see what is possible and build belief in the modernization path. Translate between technical implications, business impact, and operational reality so people at every level understand what they're working toward and why it's worth the short-term disruption. Build belief keeps us moving forward through setbacks.

Set the roadmap. Drive the investment sequencing across the different features within the platform. Ensure we have a healthy balance between near-term value delivery and moving off the legacy domain. Keep tradeoffs and sequencing decisions visible to cross-functional partners and senior stakeholders. Create conditions where all parties can move forward with shared ownership.

Unblock execution. Own the momentum. Stay two steps ahead of everyone else, surfacing dependencies and risks early. When the path forward is unclear, frame the decision, develop viable options, recommend a direction, and bring the right people together to resolve it.

Develop the team. Your core team is a junior PM, who you'll coach on execution and judgment, and a Success Manager/analyst who bridges frontline insights back to the roadmap. This is a lean, high-leverage…