Fast Facts

Avela is seeking a Senior Product Manager to lead product development and strategy in a dynamic team focused on improving educational journeys for families. The role involves managing customer insights, defining product vision, and collaborating cross-functionally to deliver impactful features.

Responsibilities: Key responsibilities include customer discovery, product strategy, feature ownership, stakeholder communication, and documentation for product launch and updates.

Skills: Candidates should have 5+ years of product management experience, particularly in B2B SaaS, and strong skills in customer engagement, technical communication, and writing clear product requirements.

Qualifications: Preferred qualifications include experience in Edtech or Govtech, startup experience, and familiarity with AI tools for research and documentation.

Location: Candidates must reside in the San Francisco Bay Area or Greater Boston, with flexible remote work options available.

Compensation: $130000 - $180000 / Annually

NOTE: CANDIDATES MUST LIVE IN SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA OR GREATER BOSTON TO BE CONSIDERED FOR THIS ROLE. Please see Location details below for more information.

Company Overview

Avela is a Nobel Prize winning platform for families to navigate their child’s educational journey. Parents can find, apply, register, and pay for school and programs for their children, all from a common application system with saved profiles. Avela also powers backend admissions and operational workflows, making it easy for schools, districts, and educational providers to equitably serve students. We’re like “OpenTable for Education” or “Mindbody for Schools.”

Role Overview

We’re looking for a Senior Product Manager to work alongside our design and engineering teams to bring the most impact to our customers and parents in enrollment. You’ll work with our customers including district administrators, school and city staff, and parents to translate insights into a product that helps families get into education programs while saving time and money. 

This is a high-ownership role: you'll help define the roadmap, write the specs, ship the features, and measure the impact—all while building the systems and processes that help Avela scale. If you thrive in an environment translating ambiguity to action, love talking to customers, and impacting millions of parents and students, let’s talk.

Role Details

• Customer Discovery: Learn, analyze, and understand customer pain points, product usage, and gaps to best represent product direction.
• Product Strategy & Roadmap: Define and own product vision for product areas, prioritize and translate vision into objectives, metrics, and features.
• End to End Feature Ownership: Take features from initial idea through launch. Design complete solutions, iterate and sequence different versions, and cross functionally work with engineering, design, marketing, client services to deliver and market.
• Technical and Go To Market Collaboration: Partner with engineering, design, go to market and client teams to design, deliver, and launch product features. Navigate tradeoffs and timelines across teams and customer deliverables.
• Stakeholder Management and Communication: Communicate proactively priorities, feature solutions, timelines, and changes while building trust across the organization.

Example Tasks

Discovery & Research

• Conduct customer interviews to understand unmet pain points
• Complete competitive landscape research to articulate gaps in Avela capabilities compared to competitors
• Synthesize feedback and clearly articulate problem statements to help generate ideas for solutioning
• Product Planning & ExecutionWrite succinct and thorough PRDs that include problem statement, requirements, edge cases, success metrics and acceptance criteria.
• Sequence iterations of features into MVP and subsequent versions that incrementally deliver value
• Assess product tradeoffs and priorities in technical conversations
• Lead regular stakeholder meetings like bug triage and release planning
• Documentation and TrainingWrite and maintain succinct and thorough PRDs
• Write release notes and announcements
• Write outward facing product documentation and blog articles
• Customer Engagement & Voice of CustomerListen to customer pain points and feedback and bring perspectives into solutioning
• Participate in troubleshooting and customer support for escalations of critical issues
• Share feature and roadmap updates with customers in a co-creative spirit

Role Qualifications

• You have 5+ years of product management experience, with at least 2 in B2B SAAS
• You can point to specific features or solutions you shipped that moved metrics. 
• You have experience and continued curiosity using AI tools to accelerate research, prototyping, and documentation while still maintaining quality output.
• You’ve worked on small teams where you had to make just enough process to get the job done. 
• You’re good at thinking through entire workflows, future proofing the concept while maintaining a MVP that delivers value. 
• You can think through hard trade offs between MVP, follow on versions and edge cases, especially in an Edtech environment.  
• You can write clearly and explain things simply. You can pivot to talk about technical trade-offs with engineers, problems with customers, and summarize well. Your PRDs are clear enough that someone could start building.
• You can wear multiple hats and shift as priorities change. If there’s a problem, you fix it and don’t wait for someone else to do it. 
• Legal ability to work in the US without visa sponsorship
• Former Edtech or Govtech experience a plus
• Former startup experience a plus
• Travel 10% of the time including conferences and company offsites.
• Located in one of our two hubs: San Francisco and Greater Boston

Role Location

We’d like to ensure colleagues have an opportunity to connect with each other regularly, and that teams have a few days to work together onsite each month. So we are only hiring candidates who live within one of our two hubs:

• San Francisco Bay Area - Office Downtown SOMA, San Francisco, CA
• Greater Boston - Office in Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA

Outside of our occasional collaboration and social gatherings, we offer a flexible, work-from-home culture. We trust our employees to work from wherever they are most productive and comfortable for most of the time, as long as it is private with high speed internet. We hope this offers the best of both worlds - the flexibility to work remotely most of the time (far more than a hybrid model), but still the benefits of in-person collaboration and socialization. More information is available on our hub coworking model at avela.org/hubs. 

Compensation 

Target total cash compensation is $130,000–$180,000, structured as a combination of base salary and performance bonus, plus a meaningful stock option grant.

Compensation will be commensurate with relevant experience.

Company Details

Avela is a Nobel Prize-winning edtech startup building the first platform for families to navigate their child's educational journey and a universal application for PK-12 education, daycare, and enrichment programs, promoting equity and access to education. We’re like “OpenTable for Education” or “Mindbody for Schools.”

For students and families, this simplifies the process of finding and applying to educational programming. For schools and districts, this streamlines operations and helps increase enrollment (and hence, revenue).

We sell our application and enrollment platform directly to school districts, charter networks, other educational providers, cities, and states. We work with school districts and charter networks across the country, including in Boston, Seattle, New Orleans, Newark, and Philadelphia. We also work with a range of nonprofits and NGOs, including Teach for America and the Inter-American Development Bank, as well as the US Military.

Our platform has four parts to cover each stage of the application journey, from exploring options to applying and final selection and admission:

Avela Explore - Mobile-optimized school finder and opportunity navigator

Avela Apply - Streamlined application management system and tracking

Avela Match - Research-based admission and student assignment lottery system.

Avela Enroll - Online registration, transfers, and enrollment platform with document collection.

We also offer a range of consulting services to help districts implement enrollment reforms and advance equity in educational programs.

Learn more at avela.org.

Team

Avela was founded by a renowned team of visionaries, including Nobel Laureate Joshua Angrist, Clark Medalist Parag Pathak, and social entrepreneur Greg Bybee. We have a passionate team of entrepreneurs, engineers, economists, and data scientists - get to know us at https://avela.org/team. 

Benefits

We love our team and care about their wellness. We strive to offer the best benefits of our peers, including:

-- Significant equity

-- Flexible vacation

-- Home office stipend

-- 401(k) program

-- Flexible Savings Account (FSA)

-- Dependent Care Saving Plan (DCFSA)

-- Commuter Benefits

-- Life Insurance (covered 100%)

-- Premium Medical Plan (Employees covered 100%)

-- Premium Dental Plan (Employees covered 100%)

-- Premium Vision Plan (Employees covered 100%)

-- Paid Family and Medical Leave

-- Free Talkspace access

-- Free access to Health Advocate for health care navigation support

-- Free One Medical membership

-- Free Teladoc membership

-- Discounted Kindbody services (gynecology, fertility, and family-building care)

Learn more at avela.org/careers.

Location

We’d like to ensure colleagues have an opportunity to connect with each other regularly, and that teams have a few days to work together onsite each month. So we are only hiring candidates for most roles who live within one of our two hubs:

• San Francisco Bay Area - Office Downtown SOMA, San Francisco, CA
• Greater Boston - Office in Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA

Please review the specific job description carefully, as each role might have it’s own unique geographic requirements. For example, some roles might only hire in one hub where the hiring manager is located, and other roles might benefit from geographic distribution and support hiring outside of hubs (e.g. sales).

Outside of our occasional collaboration and social gatherings, we offer a flexible, work-from-home culture. We trust our employees to work from wherever they are most productive and comfortable for most of the time, as long as it is private with high speed internet. We hope this offers the best of both worlds - the flexibility to work remotely most of the time (far more than a hybrid model), but still the benefits of in-person collaboration and socialization.

Just like we believe in the value of finding the right school for each child, we want to help candidates find the right company. To help you evaluate if Avela is the right fit, we want to be transparent about our evolving company culture and approach to onsite collaboration. You can read more this Community Hub Model and our collaboration norms here. Over time, we expect to spend more time working collaboratively in our hubs.

Work Authorization

Although we are strongly supportive of immigrants and individuals of all backgrounds, unfortunately, as a small startup, we are not in a position to sponsor visas and are only able to consider candidates who are authorized to work in the United States without employer sponsorship. We apologize for the inconvenience and look forward to working together in the future.

We Encourage You To Apply

Avela is a safe, inclusive workplace for people of all backgrounds and walks of life. We strongly encourage you to apply if you are from a marginalized or underrepresented group, even if you don't meet all of the job requirements. If you believe this is a role that you’ll be excited to work in every day, want to be a part of a culture like ours, and will be relentless about pushing boundaries to succeed, please apply.