Lead Product Strategy and Product Management at MovingWorlds to help us scale our high-impact programs that help professionals, social enterprises, and corporations collaborate to build a more sustainable and equitable economy.
MovingWorlds is a growing social enterprise that is building the skills and abilities of people working to scale social impact across the world. Our efforts are helping accelerate the progress of the global social enterprise movement and enabling more people to work in world-positive careers. We have doubled as an organization in the last two years, and are doubling again this year. We are the #2 company to “Escape to” in Escape the City’s annual best places to work competition and most recently, a Fast Company World Changing Idea Honoree.
We operate a portfolio of programs for individuals, corporations, and capacity-building organizations. While our experteering platform was launched nearly a decade ago and remains in operation, our growth is being driven through our MovingWorlds Institute Global Fellowship, our S-GRID Social Enterprise Accelerator, as well as through corporate-sponsored programs with companies like Microsoft, SAP, PayPal, Kering, and more.
We are looking for someone that has experience building a product strategy as well as product management processes and operations within a growing company. This position has plenty of opportunity for growth as it will lead our product and be supporting a key component of many of our programs which involve adult learning, community building, and networking. This includes programs like:
Importantly, this position will help us unify our product strategy in-line with our business + social impact strategy: A unified platform where corporations, ecosystem builders, social enterprises, and passionate individuals can learn, connect, and work together to build the sustainability and equity of the global economy.
Over the last few years, we have continued to invest in our customer platform, integrations with business software, while also investing in a Learning Management System and Community Site which is integrated with our platform and back-end systems to help automate workflows, integrate data, and provide better experiences for our users. So far, our product strategy has been co-managed by our CEO, Director of Engineering, and Director of Programs, but now our product needs focussed leadership. While we have all worked with highly effective product managers before, none of us are classically trained, so we are looking for a senior-level product manager that wants to fully own the responsibility for our product strategy, as well as our business processes.
The ideal candidate will have prior experience in:
Work will primarily fall into seven categories:
1. Product Ownership
As our Founding Product Manager, you will be responsible for understanding our complete platform, integrations, and processes, and aligning the team on the ongoing evolution of it. We want you to come in, build an in-depth understanding of our business, growth goals, and existing functionality, and then create a plan to keep evolving our product in partnership with our Director of Programs, Director of the MovingWorlds Institute, Director of Engineering, and our CEO.
2. Translate Business & Customer Needs and Pain Points into a Prioritized Product Requirements Roadmap
Starting with our customers, users, and partners, you will understand the real needs and “jobs to be done” for our ecosystem of users and partners, as well as our internal team. You will then translate their needs in a way so that our entire team can best understand the features and use-cases that our product does and does not support. You will work closely with our Director of Programs to collaborate to decide how program needs will influence product, and how product abilities can improve programs. Over time, you will keep the team aligned to these user stories, as well as use data to monitor and improve them over time.
3. Ensure Business Processes Are Occurring As Designed and Improving Over Time
Much of the value that we provide to users is beyond the traditional bounds of a web-based product, but are still supported by our business processes, customer service team, and program team. As such, we believe that this role will be uniquely positioned to help align our team on our standard operating procedures, ensure they are happening, and improve them over time.
4. Improve Product Engineering Efficiency and Effectiveness
Our team has an endless number of ideas to improve our product and platform. With your help, we will improve how we prioritize and plan these requirements, manage forward progress, and as importantly, have fun and celebrate accomplishments along the way.
5. Support Our Program Team to Develop Efficiencies and Improve Quality
Working closely with our Director of Programs and the Director of the MovingWorlds Institute, you will help the team think about ways to improve their programs. This can be through process improvements, content updates, and some may require usage of business automation / CRM tools. You will work to help build prototypes, using readily available tools, and measure their effectiveness without engineering team support so that we can validate ideas before moving to engineering.
6. Assist the CEO and Director of Programs in New Partnerships
Working with your team, you will help identify how we can add even more value to our partners, and contribute product ideas on how to make these partnerships as effective as possible.
7. Support the Improvement of Company Operations
Given strengths in strategic alignment and project management, work with the CEO and the management team to improve our operating strategy and processes
We’re growing as an organization, but we stay focused on making sure we care for each other, too. Any of our new team members will tell you that we’re different… open, vulnerable, transparent, collaborative, very growth-minded, and a little goofy. Here’s a few more tangible benefits:
If you advance to the next round, we will share our living employee guidebook with you so you can see more about our unique benefits.
MovingWorlds is a small team that is funding its growth on revenues instead of raising capital in order to stay committed to its impact. MovingWorlds is committed to a fair and equitable pay across its global team, and it uses a pro-rata adjustment calculator so that every team member is paid at an equal level compared to published market data for their roles, and based on the cost of living in their cities.
Please note that we know this is a below market salary, and our every intent is to grow to market rates. We grew 40% last year, are tracking for 100% growth this year, and have high aspirations for next year, too. Now is a really exciting time to be joining our team and we hope to have us all to market level salaries by mid-2022. All team members received a raise in 2020 and 2021 of double digit percent, and we expect this to continue. More information about salary, as well as the MovingWorlds approach to equal and fair pay, will be shared early in the process.
As a “social purpose corporation” (aka Benefit Corporation) we exist to help accelerate the progress of a more impactful, global social enterprise movement that employs more people in world-positive jobs. We absolutely look for mission alignment from all our team members.
MovingWorlds is a global, virtual team with presence in Seattle, USA; Houston, USA; Washington, D.C., USA; Medellin, Columbia; Lisbon, Portugal and São Paulo, Brazil. Ideally you will be in one of these locations, but you can work from anywhere provided you overlap with our working time zones. We will prioritize clients that are based in EST time zone. Our current clients are as far west as Seattle and as far East as Nairobi. Your home base should be between those locations for the optimal working hours.
This position will need skills and experience in the following:
The following skills and experience are a bonus:
After a thorough onboarding process, this Founding Product Manager will report directly to the CEO, and work collaboratively with our Director of Programs, Director of Engineering, and Director of the MovingWorlds Institute. This role will also be responsible for managing agile product and project management processes for our technical team (Director of Engineering, Software Engineer, Data & QA Engineer).
Ideally, this person will be located on the east coast of the Americas or the west coast of Africa or Europe to accomodate our team's working timezone, though other locations that can easily work in this time zone will be considered.
Our team is international with team members working from four continents and a diverse set of skills. While we pride ourselves on supporting a very diverse community, we are also increasing our investment and education for our own team, as well as building a team that is more representative of the diverse community we serve. As of 2020, we have implemented new policies, including attempting to eliminate bias out of our hiring process. This is done with:
To apply, please complete this form.