Product Manager

Willow Education is building the career and postsecondary readiness platform that helps schools and CBOs drive economic mobility. We combine a coherent high quality curriculum, AI-powered guidance, career exploration, labor market data, and data on hundreds of thousands of college and professional programs to help students understand who they are, discover what is possible, and make better decisions about what comes after high school.
Willow currently has five full-time team members: our CEO, Chief Product and Technology Officer, Chief Academic Officer, Partnerships Manager, and this role, alongside a small number of part-time and contract contributors. You will make up the product team alongside our CPTO and work closely with our CAO, who leads curriculum and customer success. There are very few layers between understanding a problem, making a decision, and building something better.
The Role
We're looking for a Product Manager with a design background who can own a problem from the first conversation with a user through a finished product experience.
The core of the job is understanding users, identifying the right problems to solve, developing and testing solutions, and designing the experience that gets built.
This is not a traditional PM role where you write requirements and hand them to a designer. You will be responsible for the design work yourself and have full responsibility for the overall UI/UX and aesthetic quality of Willow.
What You'll Do
Conduct research with students, educators, counselors, and school leaders.
Identify opportunities to improve existing experiences and build new ones.
Turn ambiguous problems into clear product solutions.
Explore, prototype, and test multiple approaches with real users.
Design polished, production-ready product experiences.
Make decisions about workflows, interaction patterns, information architecture, hierarchy, and usability.
Run product-based experiments to identify opportunities and strengthen outcomes.
Work closely with engineering from early exploration through implementation.
Maintain and improve the consistency, usability, and visual quality of Willow across the product.
AI-First Means Building
AI is core to how we work at Willow.
You will be expected to use AI every day to research problems, explore ideas, analyze feedback, design solutions, and build coded prototypes.
We believe product ideas should be experienced, not just described in documents or static mockups. You should be comfortable using modern AI development tools to turn ideas into working prototypes that users and teammates can interact with.
You do not need to be a software engineer, but you must be able to work and code with AI for this role.
This Is a Startup
You will have a lot of autonomy here. You will also have a lot of responsibility.
We care far more about the quality and impact of your work than whether you were online for a particular number of hours. This is not a clock-in, clock-out role where completing assigned tasks means the work is done.
If you own something, you own the outcome and usually the process that drives it.
We expect you to notice when something is not good enough, figure out why, and keep working the problem until it is. In return, you will have substantial freedom to make decisions, challenge assumptions, and shape the product.
What We're Looking For
You are exceptional at:
User research and customer discovery
Product thinking and problem definition
UX and interaction design
Prototyping and usability testing
Turning complex workflows into simple experiences
Creating polished product interfaces
Making good product decisions with incomplete information
Working directly with engineers
Taking a product from an ambiguous problem through a shipped solution
We are not looking for a PM who creates rough concepts and expects a designer to take over. You should have a strong design eye, expertise with driving design decisions, tools, and workflows, and be comfortable owning the quality of the experience yourself.
You should also be comfortable setting your own direction, making big decisions without waiting for permission, and operating in an environment where priorities and plans will change. If you need highly predictable work, tightly defined responsibilities, or daily direction from a manager, this is probably not the right role.
Experience With Public Schools Is a Major Plus
Experience working in or closely with American public schools is a significant advantage.
Students, educators, counselors, administrators, districts, and families all operate under different constraints, and many of those constraints are difficult to understand from the outside.
We are especially interested in candidates who have worked as educators, counselors, school leaders, education researchers, edtech product builders, or in other roles that involved meaningful time inside schools.
You'll Probably Thrive Here If
You like talking directly to users.
You are comfortable starting with a messy problem rather than a detailed specification.
You want ownership of both what gets built and how it works.
You have strong product and design opinions but change your mind when the evidence says you should.
You care deeply about quality.
You are comfortable moving quickly in ambiguity without layers of approval.
You want your work to visibly shape the direction of an entire product.
Compensation
Salary range: $80,000 - $130,000, depending on experience. Meaningful benefits and equity in a fast-growing mission-driven public benefit corporation.
How to Apply
Please apply through our website: https://willowed.org/careers/product-manager. We do not accept applications through LinkedIn.
Applications close Sunday, October 11, 2026 at 11:59pm ET.

Work arrangement
Yes