Product Lead for Core Product
About the team
Practicum is an online coding bootcamp aimed at sparking career change. Our mission is to give anyone, regardless of their background, a chance to master an in-demand and rewarding profession in tech. We stand on the quality of our programs; if our students don’t secure a position within six months of graduation, we guarantee to refund their money. As a company that values educational transparency and relevance, we are looking to hire people who share these sentiments and who are ready to support our students on their journey to a new, exciting career.
More than 5,000 students have already chosen Practicum. And we need your unique expertise to keep our company both competitive and innovative. You in?
About the role
Our Data product lineup consist of two Data Science programs: Data Analyst and Data Science.
The two programs share a functional core, both in terms of curriculum and operational perspective: the content is modular and partly shared, and student support is carried out by the same Guidance and Employment teams.
Our underlying promise — come learn with us, then you'll get a job in the industry — is highly dependent on this functional core. To make sure we're keeping up with an ever-changing industry and scaling challenges, we're looking for a new Lead to join our team, someone who will oversee everything that ensures our Data programs deliver our students great outcomes.
The core product team owns student results across the programs, including:
- Job/Market fit: is our graduate in demand in current job market?
- How well does the program's curriculum address identified employer needs?
- Do students actually end up having all necessary traits designed in curriculum?
- Learning outcomes delivery: how effectively do students acquire and retain knowledge & skills?
- Operational excellence: do established parts of the program perform well? Are students satisfied? Do we have any operational bottlenecks that affect student experience?
- Continuous improvement: what existing parts of the program could be improved? What opportunities for optimisation and to deliver more value we are not taking advantage of?
- Mission delivery: does our product deliver the impact we set out to deliver, and what does it take to get there?
- Student angle: do we provide the necessary impact for students to actually land their first job and successfully kick off their chosen career? Does that bring graduates economic independence and agency to contribute to a better world?
- Industry angle: given the current Data Science job market situation, how much do we contribute to the influx of new talent? Are they capable of meeting industry demand, and increasing the global impact of this industry?
Responsibilities
Product & Strategy
- Research, develop and deliver high-level Data Programs strategy, with the Curriculum, Guidance & Employment leads.
- Maintain Operations in a a good order, address problems and facilitate improvements.
- Identify long-term improvement opportunities that can significantly improve students' potential for success.
- Facilitate and manage experiments or projects that lie outside of the Core teams responsibilities (e.g. overhauling the education paradigm or introducing pace options to a program).
- Collect and synchronize backlogs across Core teams, solve priority conflicts and align leads to deliver improvements across the board.
Team & processes
- Integrate teams that own a particular piece of product responsibility into a coherent whole, facilitate synergy, handle conflicts, and maintain transparent prioritization across the board.
- Introduce shared processes and artifacts that help teams stay aligned and contribute to student success.
- Maintain good relationships and transparent understanding of goals, responsibilities and opportunities to impact the future of students and Practicum across Core teams.
- Stay in sync with the Core Web team and Practicum Growth & Marketing departments to identify best practices and implement improvements that can significantly improve student results.
Expectations
Management experience
- Previous experience of managing several teams. You know how to coordinate multiple teams with adjacent goals, care after your direct reports, facilitate growth and drive awareness and calm productivity in your people.
- You have experience in converting potential and expertise of people into a real product impact
- You know how to assemble people over a shared goal, able to introduce processes and artefacts necessary to to reach it.
Exposure to the Data Science industry
- Professional experience in the Data field, or a strong personal interest, e.g. you completed a Data Science course and made a few personal projects
- You’re excited about the Data Science industry, can see yourself and infect others by the beauty seen through the facets of math, statistics, data analysis case studies and data science algorithms when applied to the real world
- You have a solid understanding of Data Science community and drive to change it for the better through introducing new people to the industry, with high standards and up-to date mastered skills.
Product experience
- Previous experience in solving business needs by product improvement: driving metrics growth, solving operational and product bottlenecks, designing and delivering improvements
- You know how to set up and maintain a clear strategy, convert it into goals and track progress across multiple teams to ensure synchronised results delivery among owners, adjacent teams and stakeholders.
Ops experience
- You aren’t stressed by managing an operations unit. You have understand how to balance a run/change priorities in an operations-heavy team, can drive improvements in such a team without compromising operational metrics.
High bar of expected results
- You know how to convert high-level vision into concrete initiatives with fixed expectations, can manage stakeholders expectations if needed
- You’re capable of taking entrepreneurial risks, greenlighting potentially impactful initiatives in a sustainable way: facilitating well-designed experiments, introducing intermediate goals which gradually unlock scale of efforts and costs, as a hypotheses turns into a solid part of the product.
Student empathy
- You understand student context deeply: can understand the path they are going, and are able to empathise with their challenges
- You are genuinely excited to make an impact in hundreds of lives and are driven by it
- You can vibe with students: you’d delighted by the possibility of spending a couple of hours with several students, getting to know them and learning about their experience in changing careers.
Curiosity and erudition in education
- You have either professional or personal exposure to education, which you reflected on and formed your own opinion on what a good education consists of.
- Broad knowledge and keenness in education best practices, case studies and popular methodologies.