[Hiring] Director, PDM Planning & Operations @Risepoint

Role Description

The Impact You Will Make

Partner Data Manager (PDM) is Risepoint's centralized database for partner and program information. It is also the mechanism through which Partner Support updates and distributes partner-facing content and resources organization-wide, giving teams one source of truth and helping ensure consistent messaging across Risepoint and with prospective and current students.

As Risepoint's business grows more dependent on PDM, this role ensures PDM evolves deliberately: anticipating business needs, prioritizing the right improvements (including user experience), and powering the transformation initiatives the business has prioritized. You will lead the business direction and roadmap for PDM, translating broader business priorities and the needs of Partner Support, Finance, Marketing, and other teams into a clear, prioritized roadmap. You'll partner closely with Business Technology's Product Owner, who leads technical delivery, while you own the business case, priorities, and the team that keeps PDM running reliably day to day.

How You Will Bring Our Mission to Life

What You Will Do:

• Serve as the business owner for PDM, shaping its multi-year vision and translating Risepoint’s broader business and transformation priorities into a clear roadmap, priorities, and business requirements.
• Represent the business voice in roadmap trade-off decisions when partnering with Business Technology.
• Build and maintain a structured intake and prioritization process for enhancement requests, balancing transformation-critical work, UX improvements, compliance/audit needs, and operational fixes.
• Develop business cases and value justifications (cost, risk, efficiency, user experience) for proposed PDM investments.
• Identify UX friction points and data/functionality gaps across PDM users and champion improvements through the roadmap.
• Serve as the primary point of accountability for PDM within Partner Support, representing its capabilities, constraints, and roadmap to leadership.
• Act as liaison to Business Technology on all PDM-related initiatives, escalating and resolving cross-functional roadblocks.
• Maintain a cross-functional view of how PDM connects to adjacent systems and processes, anticipating ripple effects of a given change rather than evaluating each request in isolation.
• Own post-release follow-through — checking that changes landed as intended, gathering feedback from affected teams, and feeding lessons learned back into how future changes are scoped and rolled out.

What Success Looks Like:

• A prioritized, business-aligned PDM roadmap is in place and jointly owned with Business Technology's Product Owner.
• Enhancement requests move through a clear intake and prioritization process.
• Key UX pain points and data/functionality gaps for PDM users have been identified and are being actively addressed.
• Major PDM releases land with minimal disruption because affected teams were identified, informed, and prepared in advance.
• Percentage of roadmap items entering Business Technology's backlog with a validated business case, clear priority, and defined success criteria.
• Breadth of cross-functional input into the roadmap — how many departments actively contribute needs and priorities each planning cycle.
• Stakeholder confidence — feedback from department heads and business leaders that their needs are understood and genuinely reflected in the roadmap.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in business systems, enterprise application management, or product/program leadership, including 3+ years in a director-level or equivalent strategic leadership role.
• Demonstrated experience owning a roadmap or product strategy for a business-critical system, ideally in partnership with a separate technical/IT product or delivery team.
• 5+ years of people leadership experience, including experience managing managers.
• Experience with business case development, prioritization frameworks, and cross-functional stakeholder management at the executive level.

Requirements

• Higher education, ed-tech, or partner/affiliate-based business experience.
• Experience supporting or leading organizational transformation initiatives involving technology systems.

Benefits

• Risepoint is an equal-opportunity employer and supports a diverse and inclusive workforce.