SmartPass
Director of Product
🇺🇸 Hybrid - NY
🕑 Full-Time
💰 $180,000 - $250,000
💻 Product Development
🗓️ May 7th, 2024
B2B B2C K-12Who we are
SmartPass helps K-12 staff coordinate student movement throughout the school day. Rotating classes, pull-out interventions, and counseling sessions are just a few examples of managing traffic and teacher capacity. SmartPass unlocks communication across classrooms and increases safety to ensure everyone can focus on learning instead of logistics.
Today, SmartPass serves over 2 million students in 1,000+ schools in 6 countries to maximize instructional time and improve student outcomes. SmartPass is on-track to be one of the fastest-growing startups in K-12. And we’re just getting started.
We’re backed by the leading investors in K-12 Edtech, including Reach Capital, Edovate Capital, Precursor Ventures, the founder of SchoolMint, and more. Currently, the team is 41 people.
Role overview
As our first PM, you’ll help build new features and brand-new products that maximize student instructional time for 2 million+ educators and students (~1 million WAUs today). Your role involves close collaboration with the entire EPD team — design (2 designers), engineering (~9 engineers) and cross-functional stakeholders. You’ll report to our CEO & Co-founder, a former PM at Salesforce & Quip. The estimated salary range for this role is $180,000 - $250,000 per year.
In the first few months, you’ll get your hands dirty right away (just a few examples):
SmartPass helps K-12 staff coordinate student movement throughout the school day. Rotating classes, pull-out interventions, and counseling sessions are just a few examples of managing traffic and teacher capacity. SmartPass unlocks communication across classrooms and increases safety to ensure everyone can focus on learning instead of logistics.
Today, SmartPass serves over 2 million students in 1,000+ schools in 6 countries to maximize instructional time and improve student outcomes. SmartPass is on-track to be one of the fastest-growing startups in K-12. And we’re just getting started.
We’re backed by the leading investors in K-12 Edtech, including Reach Capital, Edovate Capital, Precursor Ventures, the founder of SchoolMint, and more. Currently, the team is 41 people.
Role overview
As our first PM, you’ll help build new features and brand-new products that maximize student instructional time for 2 million+ educators and students (~1 million WAUs today). Your role involves close collaboration with the entire EPD team — design (2 designers), engineering (~9 engineers) and cross-functional stakeholders. You’ll report to our CEO & Co-founder, a former PM at Salesforce & Quip. The estimated salary range for this role is $180,000 - $250,000 per year.
In the first few months, you’ll get your hands dirty right away (just a few examples):
- You’ll be given a micro-problem, work with design/engineering on a solution, and get your first quick-win.
- You’ll work on defining the strategy for our Flex product.
- You’ll do a listening tour: visiting schools, sitting on customer calls, reading thousands of user-submitted feedback.
- You’ll work with our Director of Customer Success to redesign the onboarding flow for new schools.
We’re looking for folks with:
- You have 5+ years of industry product management experience.
- 🏫 K-12 Experience: You’ve built products for K-12 and/or have worked in a K-12 school.
- Wicked prioritization skills. We serve 4 very different end-users: students, teachers, admins, and parents.
- Strong design skills or previous product design roles.
- You have a talent for working on user-centered products that look great too.
- You have a desire to constantly advance your work and care about the details.
- You are an excellent communicator and team player.
- You are endlessly curious with a drive to keep learning.
- You are a self-starter and a doer.
Nice to Haves
- Hybrid B2C and B2B product sense (like Slack)
- Previous work on both 0→1 and 1→n initiatives.
- You’ve worked with small, fast-paced teams before.
What you’ll do:
- Understand and prioritize work so the team is always working on the most impactful initiatives.
- Talk to customers, understand their problems, translate and evaluate these into opportunities for the business.
- Work closely in a cross-functional team to explore ideas, discover the problem space and shape the solution.
- Motivate a group of smart people to deliver products and experiences that users love.
- Identify product, organizational, and process opportunities and drive these, without direction and resourcing.
Why you might be excited about us
- We’re building the software that reduces admin and teacher burden, making schools a better learning environment. If you’re into education and love working on tough design problems, you’ll love helping build our product.
- Good design is one of our core values and differentiators. We won’t ship something that isn’t easy to use and looks good, even though we’re still a small startup.
- We’re small, so you’ll have big responsibilities and lay the groundwork as we start scaling.
- Our team has a wide range of experiences (folks from Microsoft, Salesforce, Nielsen, previous startups, and K-12 administrators/teachers).
- Our culture is simple: we work hard, we’re lifelong learners, and we’re fun — at every monthly all-hands, we start with a “memes of the month” and then dive deep into the work someone is doing.
- Get in at the ground-level of a fast-growing startup.
- We'll mould your role to shape a career you're excited about. We care a ton about your satisfaction and job happiness, and will help prep you for whatever you're looking for in the future.
Why you might not be excited about us
- We’re small (~40 people in the company right now), so if you like more established companies, it’s not (yet) the right time. You’ll help build our company’s culture.
- Since we’re an early stage startup, projects and priorities may shift. We’ll expect you to bring your own experience and give input to shift these priorities, too.
- Our customers love us, *and* there's a lot we can improve. It's a great place to be, but means there's some jank. (Nothing too scary! 😃)
Go Deeper
- Check out benefits & perks, like the $750 WFH stipend, 100% healthcare coverage, buy any book policy, and more.
- Check out our support site to watch some videos and see how SmartPass works!
