Senior Product Manager

Headquarters: Remote About Playlab Playlab is a tech non-profit dedicated to helping educators and students become critical consumers and creators of AI. We believe that an open-source, community-driven approach is key to harnessing the potential of AI in education. We equip communities with AI tools and hands-on professional development that empowers educators & students to build custom AI apps for their unique context. Over 60,000 educators have published apps on Playlab – and the impact is growing every day. At Playlab, we believe that AI is a new design material - one that should be shaped by many to bring their ideas about learning to life. If you're passionate about building creative, equitable futures for students and teachers, we hope you'll join us. The Role Playlab is hiring its first dedicated Product Manager. This is a hands-on, high-ownership role for someone who wants to shape how educators and students build with AI—not from a distance, but in the details. You'll work to implement Playlab’s strategic pillars including: Expand what's possible: Add new capabilities (e.g., components, agents) that expands Playlab beyond chatbots, so that users can build more software that meets their needs. Deepen the context: Make Playlab the tool that best understands and adapts to user context, building on and expanding beyond our current work on curriculum knowledge graphs. Set the safety standard: Establish Playlab as the benchmark for responsible AI in education, shifting the burden of safety from users to the platform. Playlab has a near-term strategy defined. What we need is someone who can translate that strategy into shipped product, while sharpening the strategy based on what you learn along the way. You'll work directly with our CTO, engineering team, ML team, designers, and partnerships team. You'll hear directly from educators through our deep partner relationships. And you'll make product decisions that affect how educators and learners across the globe experience AI in education. This role requires comfort with ambiguity. Playlab is an early-stage product with significant scope, a growing team, and limited existing product process. You'll need to build that process as you go—not wait for someone to hand it to you. If you need a lot of structure to do your best work, this isn't the right fit. If you thrive when you can shape the environment around you, read on. What You'll Do Drive Product Execution Own the product roadmap: prioritize ruthlessly, write clear specs, and work with design, engineering, and learning teams to ship De-risk builds by breaking work into meaningful increments that let us learn as we go Make tradeoffs when scope, timeline, and resources collide and communicate those tradeoffs clearly Go Deep on the Details Write detailed requirements that align design, engineering, and go-to-market teams Understand the technical constraints and possibilities, and work side-by-side with engineering Engage directly with users, and gather user feedback, usage data, and partner insights to inform decisions Build Product Process Establish rituals, artifacts, and communication patterns that help a growing team stay aligned Create clarity about how product decisions get made, without slowing the team down Document what's working so others can build on it Collaborate Across Teams Work with Learning and Partnerships to translate field feedback into clear priorities and simpler designs Coordinate with design to ensure what we build is usable, not just functional Refine Strategy as You Learn Pressure-test strategic assumptions against what you see in the product and hear from users Surface when priorities should shift, and make the case with evidence Help leadership make better decisions by bringing clarity to ambiguous situations You Might Be a Fit If You... Have 7+ years of product management experience, including at least one early-stage or high-growth environment where you had to build process, not just follow it Hav