[Hiring] Academic Program Success Lead @Springboard Roles

Role Description

The Academic Program Success Lead is a critical driver of Springboard's growth into new verticals: equal parts strategist, operator, and team leader. The Academic Program Success Lead is responsible for all aspects of delivery for our Allied Health and AI programs across B2C and B2B.

This role is for someone who thrives in the role of a builder: taking early-stage ideas, mobilizing teams, and delivering outcomes that are both business-sound and student-centered. You'll lead new offerings from concept to execution, surface risks and opportunities across existing programs, and translate complex inputs into clear recommendations for leadership and cross-functional stakeholders.

If you're energized by ownership, comfortable getting into the weeds, and motivated by impact that changes people's lives, this is your kind of role.

Key Responsibilities

• Portfolio Ownership & Strategic Influence:
  • Own all aspects of student support and delivery for full student journey for multiple new initiatives from end-to-end, from strategic framing of new courses through execution.
  • Proactively identify capability gaps within programs and student journeys before they become bottlenecks, design and iterate to then operationalize infrastructure.
  • Translate portfolio-level insights surfaced by the Program Success team into strategic recommendations for Program Leadership, cross-functional prioritization, and roadmapping.
• Team Management & Operational Excellence:
  • Directly manage and sustain a high performing team by actively investing in individual development, creating clear accountability structures, and maintaining team energy and focus through rapid organizational change.
  • Demonstrate a founder's instinct for operational design of a learner’s experience, identifying gaps in process or capability that give you the ability to monitor performance or add friction to the learner journey.
  • Leverage AI tools as a force multiplier across the team's work, modeling and embedding AI fluency as a default operating practice, not a nice-to-have.
• Partnership Nurturing:
  • Play a strong role with external partners, equipping Client Success teams with a POV and context to allow them to be successful, understand client nuance (e.g. B2B marketplace partner versus direct B2B pilots versus B2C) and design operations to delight and deliver.
  • Serve as a connective force internally, building trust across teams and aligning cross-functional colleagues around shared goals, timelines, and accountability to deliver on outcomes and enable agility through tight feedback loops.

Qualifications

• 7-10 years of professional experience where you’ve demonstrated end-to-end ownership over meaningful work, with some portion of that experience at a rapidly evolving startup environment.
• Founder mentality: at least one or two clear examples where you personally created an operational capability that did not exist before, in an environment where no one handed you a playbook.
• Effective people management skills: energized by nurturing the professional development of individuals on your team and have a natural ability to energize teams through rapidly pacing changes.
• Strong external partnership skills: experience in recruiting, negotiating with, and managing relationships with external partners.
• Operational design instinct: good judgment on when to build a scrappy MVP versus when to operationalize something.
• Speed and judgment: default to action and move fast, but know when to slow down — particularly when compliance, accreditation, or partner relationships are at stake.
• AI fluency: extensively leverage AI tools to amplify your output at high quality.
• Creating structure in an ambiguous environment: ability to break down ambiguous, complex problems into workable components.
• Cross-functional influence: driven outcomes by coordinating across teams you did not manage.

What does Success Look Like?

• First 90 days:
  • Accountability for delivering on cohorts end-to-end.
  • Identified 2-3 key risks and began to work cross-functionally toward a systematic solution.
  • Firm understanding of all programs and client agreements.
• Within 6 months:
  • Delivered on key outcomes: Retention, Refund, Engagement, CSAT, NPS, Completion, Externship hand-offs for more than one program.
  • Demonstrated strong ownership over experimentation and program iterations needed to deliver said outcomes.
  • Your team is thriving with clear expectations, accountability, and professional growth.
• Within 12 months:
  • Pivotal in growing our portfolio of Allied Health and AI programs.
  • Created and adopted playbooks, processes, and automations that enable scale.
  • Understood personas, proposed and implemented material changes to our human guided services model and learner experience.