Product Specialist

Job Summary

ABOUT THE ROLE

As a Product Specialist in Product Management, you will own and shape product direction for assigned product areas. You will define and execute product strategy by translating customer, stakeholder, market, regulatory, and business needs into a clear product vision, roadmap priorities, and actionable backlog decisions for agile delivery teams. You will lead product discovery across author, reviewer, approver, psychometrician, and exam-builder workflows, balancing customer value, business outcomes, operational realities, technical feasibility, compliance expectations, and product viability to drive enhancements and new capabilities. You will also identify and shape innovative opportunities, including the responsible use of generative AI and other emerging technologies.

The Product Specialist in Product Management must contribute to their product team a solid knowledge of the various constraints of the business such as from marketing, sales, support, finance, legal and privacy. The Product Specialist must also contribute a deep knowledge of our users and customers, and data about how our customers engage with our products. Finally, the product Specialist is expected to track industry trends and the competitive landscape as they pertain to their product.

This job, as with the other roles on the product team, is an individual contributor role. You will need to be able to influence your teammates, as well as colleagues, stakeholders, and key executives, through your use of data and logic with strong communication skills translating complex concepts in easy-to-understand ways.

ABOUT YOU

You are a curious, evidence-led product Specialist who enjoys getting close to users and creating clear problem framings - using your product sense to identify the right problems to solve. You experiment with current AI tools in your work and understand that partnership with engineering and your credibility with technology are key to your success in shipping great products. You break problems down with strong analytical instincts, you care about helping people better themselves, and you are at your best when learning fast inside a team that is building something that matters.

While each member of the product team may be accountable for a specific risk, we look for product Specialist that understand that consistent innovation is the result of each member of the product team contributing their passion and their ideas. The product Specialist must collaborate closely with their product designer and engineers to discover effective solutions and then work together to deliver those solutions to market.

While we empower our product teams to figure out the best solutions to the problems that need to be solved, we also hold those teams accountable for the results. Shipping is necessary, but not sufficient. We look for product Specialist that are not afraid of signing up for results, even when this means they have to work through others to achieve the necessary results.

Key Responsibilities

Strategy and outcomes

• Help define a clear value proposition and outcome-driven goals for your scope, traceable to the jobs your users are trying to get done.
• Plan measurement up front - leading indicators that tell you whether you are on track, lagging indicators that tell you whether you got there.
• Make trade-offs within your scope, balancing strategic bets against near-term commitments and operational needs.

Discovery and customer insight

• Build direct understanding of your users through interviews, usability sessions, and time spent observing real workflows.
• Use both generative and evaluative discovery in the right places - not just running tests on what's already been decided.
• Translate user insight and business context into a clear set of opportunities your team can act on.

Delivery and quality

• Work with engineering and design as a single team, sharing problem framing and design responsibility rather than handing over requirements.
• Create clear product artefacts - Vision, PRDs, specs, user stories, and acceptance criteria - at the right level for the team, so engineering can build without constant clarification.

• Own quality from concept to delivery - not just functional correctness, but whether the work ships well and meets the bar you set.

AI and technology

• Bring practical, hands-on experience with current AI tools (e.g. generative AI, prompt engineering) into your day-to-day product work.
• Identify where AI capabilities could meaningfully improve user outcomes; partner with senior PMs and closely with engineering to evaluate options pragmatically.
• Stay tech-curious beyond AI - devices, ecosystems, adjacent platform shifts - when they affect how learners experience your product.

Stakeholders and influence

• Build strong working relationships with engineering, design, data, and the stakeholders relevant to your scope.
• Communicate progress, trade-offs, and risks clearly; raise things early rather than late.
• Tell a clear product story - what problem you are solving, for whom, why it matters, how you will know it worked.

Skill Requirements

• Proven track record as an individual contributor product Specialists, leading critical, technically complex product initiatives from strategy through release with measurable customer, operational, and business outcomes.
• Strong discovery skills - running interviews and usability sessions, and validating problems before committing to solutions.
• Hands-on familiarity with AI-assisted workflows or emerging technologies in your own product work, particularly in environments requiring strong governance, human review, quality controls, and responsible product design to support accurate, secure, and defensible outcomes.

• Experience working closely with engineering and design in an iterative delivery model, with an outcome-driven approach rather than a feature-delivery mindset.
• Demonstrated success driving cross-functional alignment, marshaling resources across teams to overcome obstacles and deliver coherent, impactful outcomes.
• Ability to navigate ambiguity, make informed tradeoffs, and escalate critical risks when appropriate.
• Highly analytical and data-informed, with experience defining metrics, planning measurement, and translating usage and performance signals into clear product direction and prioritization.
• Proven ability to solve complex problems with many constraints, and to translate customer and business needs into clearly documented requirements and functional solutions - articulated through well-structured written narratives grounded in data and sound judgment.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to condense complex technical concepts into clear, non-technical language for diverse stakeholder audiences.

Track record of shipping features that align with original requirements, with minimal post-release corrections or escalations.

Other Requirements

Skill Matrix

Skill Mandatory/Good to have Proficiency 1-5

Product strategy and roadmap ownership Mandatory 5

User discovery, interviews, and usability testing Mandatory 5

PRD/specification writing, user stories, and acceptance criteria Mandatory 4

Cross-functional collaboration with engineering, design, data, and stakeholders Mandatory 5

Data-informed decision-making, metrics definition, and product measurement Mandatory 4

AI-assisted workflows, generative AI, and responsible product design Mandatory 4

Market, regulatory, and competitive landscape awareness Good to have 3

Technical curiosity around emerging platforms, devices, and ecosystems Good to have 3