Director, Product Management

Position Summary:

Highlights for Children, a global brand publishing content that fosters joyful learning, has ambitious plans to expand its offerings into early childhood education settings. Our solutions will meet the needs of early childhood educators by centering the play-based learning, cognitive development, and social emotional skills that are hallmarks of the Highlights approach.

We are seeking a Director of Product Management to drive the product portfolio strategy to fuel our expansion. This new role reports to the General Manager for Early Childhood Education (ECE), is an integral member of the ECE leadership team, and works closely with the Program Manager, Director of Product Marketing, and Senior Editorial Director.

This role is perfect for someone who is energetic, organized, and entrepreneurial. You are motivated by the opportunity to conceive solutions that meet customer needs, inspired by our mission to help children become their best selves, and driven to find new ways to reach more children, teachers, and families.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

The Director of Product Management drives product vision and financial success for the portfolio while representing the voice of the customer, understanding market dynamics and customer insights, demonstrating business and financial acumen, and exemplifying a mastery of technical and soft skills that enable stakeholders to collaborate successfully on the creation and lifecycle management of market-winning products in this evolving space. You lead through influence, make meaningful connections, and communicate a compelling product vision that inspires confidence and drives alignment. You are driven to grow and win, move with urgency, minimize complexity, and make smart tradeoffs.

In this role, you will be expected to:

• Research, develop, articulate, and continually refine a multi-year product roadmap and portfolio strategy and continually update stakeholders on market shifts, progress, risks, and opportunities.
• Communicate a clear and compelling portfolio vision that inspires confidence and action, bring objectivity to decision making and trade-offs, invite and synthesize diverse perspectives to ensure alignment across stakeholders.
• Establish and nurture a network of early childhood experts, influencers, authors, and practitioners who provide insight, research, efficacy, market intel, and fresh thinking as inputs to product vision.
• Manage a product portfolio lifecycle that ensures a healthy pipeline of value delivery centered around customer needs.
• Gather inputs from and collaborate with stakeholders across the enterprise - including finance, operations, digital, legal, marketing, editorial, and product - to drive business case development and refinement.
• Secure product investments by prioritizing and synthesizing inputs, weighing options, making decisions, and developing business cases with clear customer needs, business imperatives, mission alignment, success measures, risks, and opportunities.
• Constantly look ahead to identify opportunities, test assumptions, apply financial acumen and make connections to support growth.
• Partner with Product Development and Product Marketing to translate product vision into product development and go-to-market activation, with clear goals, business cases, and success criteria.
• Collaborate with Product Marketing Director on product positioning, buyer personas, pricing strategy, value proposition, competitive advantages, and success criteria.

You'll thrive in this position if you:

• Embrace an expansive approach to increasing the impact of Highlights by exploring new market segments and partnering across the enterprise to unlock opportunities to reach parents and adjacent markets through early childhood offerings.
• Balance ideation and creativity with clear communication - both written and oral - and creation of artifacts (business cases, roadmaps) that ensure clarity and consistency in decision making, foster alignment, and create transparency.
• Have a strong sense of accountability and drive to create results at every stage of the product life cycle.
• Demonstrate flexible thinking and professional curiosity while operating with clarity and decisiveness informed by customer insights, research base, market dynamics, business imperatives, and mission alignment.
• Use influence, relationship-building, communication, and strategic thinking to establish yourself as a change agent and innovative thinker.

Individuals in director level roles at Highlights are expected to exemplify and model our leadership competencies: foster alignment, grow self and others, create results, champion change, and demonstrate positive impact. In addition to your role expertise, you will contribute to enterprise-wide initiatives that drive leadership development, continuous improvement, and innovation.

Within the first month, you will:

• Receive a very warm Highlights welcome!
• Start to build relationships on your immediate team, with cross functional collaborators, and among others across the enterprise
• Conduct a listening tour where you build role empathy and understanding of context, priorities, and roles and have the chance to ask thought-provoking questions.

Within 60 days, you will:

• Engage with internal collaborators across the enterprise to learn about the team, processes, in market products and current projects in progress
• Support team efforts on current business cases and product roadmap in development
• Partner with other ECE leaders to refine roles, responsibilities, and processes

Within the first 90 days, you will:

• Develop the financial acumen required to support the portfolio budgeting process
• Own the strategic short- and long-term product roadmap
• Drive development of business cases for solutions of varying sizes and price points to accelerate our speed to market
• Accelerate our entrance into the early childhood market by building the product roadmap for short and long term wins
• Contribute product and customer insights to annual budget, board submissions, company meetings, and partnership conversations
• Engage with customers directly and indirectly to inform decision making

Supervisory Responsibilities:

The Director of Product Management does not currently have any direct reports but has potential to grow the team as the business scales.

Education and Experience:

• Product management experience in both print and digital delivery preferred
• 7-10+ years of strong leadership experience and demonstrated change agent
• Experience scaling and accelerating pace of growth
• Ability to analyze, summarize, and synthesize varied inputs into a clear, engaging, profitable solutions
• Must think and act strategically while demonstrating the hands-on skills necessary to contribute to a small and focused team, deliver high-quality products and services; display practical business sense, strong communication, fiscal skills and accountability; expertise in budgeting, project approval, and forecasting spending
• Confident, objective, organized, inquisitive, motivated, collaborative communicator who thrives in evolving market condition
• Proven ability to lead through influence, make connections and build positive rapport, and negotiate across functional teams

This position is remote with 25% travel for in-person meetings and attendance at trade shows.

Physical Requirements:

• Prolonged periods sitting at a desk and working on a computer.
• Must be able to lift up to 15 pounds at times.

If you do not meet every requirement listed, we encourage you to apply anyway. Studies have shown that women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every qualification. We are dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive and authentic workplace, so if you are drawn to this role and your past experiences do not align perfectly to the job description, we encourage you to apply.

Reasonable Accommodation Notice: Federal law requires employers to provide reasonable accommodation to qualified individuals with disabilities. Please tell us if you require reasonable accommodations to apply for a job or to perform your job. Examples of reasonable accommodation include making a change to the application process or work procedures, providing documents in an alternate format, using a sign language interpreter, or using specialized equipment.