[Hiring] Senior Product Manager @Encoura

Role Description

Encoura is seeking a Senior Product Manager to lead the product strategy, roadmap, and business outcomes for our One Stop and Help Desk offerings. These solutions enable colleges and universities to deliver accessible, responsive support to students, faculty, and staff across voice, chat, and digital channels. This role owns the evolution of a differentiated, scalable service experience—combining contact center operations, Amazon Connect (AWS Connect), AI-powered voice and chat assistants, intelligent self-service, and seamless human-agent support.

You will translate institutional needs, operational insights, and emerging technology into a prioritized portfolio strategy, aligning engineering, service delivery, client-facing teams, and executive stakeholders around measurable improvements in customer experience, operational performance, and growth.

A Day in the Life

• Own and communicate the One Stop and Help Desk product vision, strategy, multi-quarter roadmap, and prioritized backlog, balancing client needs, competitive differentiation, commercial opportunities, technical investment, and operational efficiency.
• Set product direction for Amazon Connect-based omnichannel experiences, including IVR, intelligent routing, queue management, agent desktop/workflows, integrations, reporting, workforce management, and quality assurance; partner with engineering on architectural tradeoffs and scalability.
• Lead the strategy and delivery of conversational AI across voice and chat—including virtual agents, knowledge-grounded answers, automated resolutions, intent recognition, escalation to human agents, and conversation analytics—with explicit quality, safety, and performance measures.
• Conduct market and customer discovery with higher education institutions, frontline agents, service operations, implementation, sales, and client success; map end-to-end service journeys and translate unmet needs into differentiated product opportunities.
• Define business cases, success metrics, and performance targets; own product-level accountability for CSAT, NPS, customer effort, digital containment, AHT, FCR, self-service adoption, call abandonment, agent productivity, and SLA performance, in partnership with operating teams.
• Use contact center analytics, speech analytics, conversational intelligence, financial/operational data, and competitive intelligence to evaluate opportunities, prioritize investments, monitor AI accuracy and escalation effectiveness, and drive continuous improvement.
• Lead discovery through launch and adoption: define outcomes and requirements, guide UX and technical decisions, make scope and priority tradeoffs, ensure release readiness, and equip go-to-market, implementation, and service teams with positioning and enablement.
• Influence senior stakeholders and cross-functional teams without direct authority; proactively manage dependencies, delivery risks, vendor/platform relationships, and roadmap decisions while mentoring less-experienced product colleagues as appropriate.

Role Progression

• Within 1 month, you'll assess the One Stop and Help Desk business, customer segments, economics, service workflows, current roadmap, Amazon Connect architecture, AI capabilities, partner dependencies, and operational scorecard; establish relationships with key leaders and identify immediate risks and opportunities.
• Within 3 months, you'll present a clear portfolio assessment, prioritized multi-quarter roadmap, and measurable outcome framework; align product, engineering, operations, and commercial leaders on strategic priorities, AI automation opportunities, and delivery tradeoffs; lead an initial high-value initiative.
• Within 6 months, you'll be accountable for execution and demonstrated progress against agreed product KPIs; deliver and measure a material portfolio enhancement, advance the voice/chat AI and self-service strategy, and establish a repeatable process for customer discovery, roadmap governance, and post-launch optimization.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Business, Information Systems, Computer Science, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Typically 5+ years of relevant experience, including significant ownership of SaaS or technology product strategy and delivery; prior experience with contact center platforms, customer service technology, or managed service-enabled products strongly preferred.
• Deep understanding of contact center operations and service delivery, including omnichannel engagement, IVR, routing and queues, workforce management (WFM), quality assurance (QA), service-level agreements (SLAs), and reporting/analytics.
• Hands-on product experience with Amazon Connect (AWS Connect) or a comparable cloud contact center platform; able to make informed decisions about platform capabilities, integrations, vendor dependencies, architectural constraints, and total cost of ownership.
• Demonstrated experience launching or scaling conversational AI, chatbots, voice assistants, or automated self-service; understands knowledge management, speech analytics, conversational intelligence, agent handoffs, AI evaluation, and responsible deployment.
• Proven ability to define and improve measurable product and operational outcomes, including CSAT, NPS, customer effort, containment, AHT, FCR, self-service adoption, abandonment, agent productivity, and service quality.
• Strong product leadership skills in discovery, market assessment, strategy, business cases, roadmap prioritization, agile execution, stakeholder influence, and written and executive-level communication; comfortable using Jira, Confluence, and analytics tools.
• Sound commercial and technical judgment; able to work independently through ambiguity, challenge assumptions constructively, negotiate tradeoffs, and align diverse teams around outcomes rather than feature requests.
• Experience in higher education or EdTech is a plus; commitment to improving the student support experience and using AI to augment—not simply replace—effective human service.
• Successful candidates will be required to complete and pass a CLEAR™ identity verification as part of the pre-employment screening process.

Requirements

• The annual base salary range for this exempt position is $160,000 - $175,000 and reflects the midpoint through maximum of the established range for this role.
• Encoura establishes compensation using national market data, internal equity considerations, and organizational budget factors to ensure fairness and consistency across the organization. Certain roles may also be eligible for variable compensation in addition to base salary.
• Employees in this role are eligible for Encoura’s comprehensive benefits package, which includes health insurance, retirement contributions, paid time off, and other programs that support employee well-being.

Company Description

Encoura’s mission is to empower students and institutions to create meaningful connections so everyone can make the most informed decisions to achieve their goals. Since 1972, the Company has evolved its products and services to better represent the link between students and higher education institutions and to create the highest probability of student success.

Encoura’s expertise now spans enrollment, research, marketing, student success, and advancement and provides an unmatched combination of higher education experience and innovative solutions for colleges and universities. The Company also offers Encourage® — the nation’s largest free college and career planning program used by millions of high school students and educators nationwide.

It is the policy of the Company to provide equal employment opportunities to all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, protected veteran or disabled status, or genetic information. All applicants must be eligible to work in the U.S.

Encoura endeavors to make reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities and disabled veterans pursuant to applicable federal and state law. If you are an individual with a disability and require reasonable accommodation to complete any part of the application process or are limited in the ability and need an alternative method for applying, please contact the Talent Team.

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