Career Center

Benefits at a Glance

Special Instructions to Applicants : Please attach a cover letter and a resume in the Supporting Documents section of the application. Please make sure to include employment dates on the resume in Month/ Year format.

Position Summary

OpenStax (part of Rice University) is a non-profit textbook publisher, learning software producer, and platform for learning research. Our mission is to provide every student and instructor with free access to high-quality teaching and learning resources that help them succeed. We have created a library of more than 50 free and openly licensed college textbooks that have served millions of students across the globe, resulting in over one billion dollars in savings. We have created additional software and course materials to help college students read with more engagement and practice more effectively, incorporating our research team's expertise in cognitive science and machine learning.

Product Managers (PDMs) are responsible for creating and delivering the right product or service to OpenStax's customers, partners, and personnel. They are responsible for synthesizing the organizational mission and strategic goals, and curating ideas for their product to meet those strategic goals. They define the why, what, and when for their product or feature-set that the user experience team will design and the engineering will build.

The Product Manager II will set priorities, work with end users, user experience teams, marketing, customer service, and quality assurance to get feedback, and adjust goals as needed to deliver the best value for our users. They work closely with engineering teams to build the product features. The PDM II will be responsible for a moderately complex product or set of features. Additionally, the PDM II will be able to navigate our organization without assistance, negotiate with and persuade leadership and a wide variety of people to get buy-in for ideas, and identify what needs to happen and take action without being asked. They gather periodic feedback from OpenStax leaders, advisors, and customers. In addition, they understand their product in the context of the OpenStax strategy, and they generate ideas for whole product improvement while demonstrating credibility in cross-functional interaction.

You will join a team who is driving change at a pivotal phase of our evolution as we deliver high quality educational content ranging from textbooks to simulations and videos, to exercises and complete courses.

We celebrate diversity of all kinds and are committed to nurturing an inclusive environment. We hire, develop, and retain talented people from all backgrounds. We are part of a private university, but our team comes from a variety of backgrounds and includes people who attended universities and community colleges, as well as people who did not graduate from college.

Ideal candidates have a demonstrated ability to plan and create engaging, impactful product experiences as part of a cross-functional product team, are proactive by nature, are creative product thinkers, hands-on and are passionate about education.

Essential Functions

• Plans and manages and leads analyses and studies of business processes, functions, organizations and teams
• Provides consultation and expert advice supervisors, managers and other interested and informed parties on technical, systems, or process related topics
• Discusses business strategies, practices, or policies with managers business process studies
• Designs and develops models and practices to support sound business decisions
• Determines best practices and recommends improvements to current practices
• Creates and manages project plans, including change management and technical implementation
• Serves in a leadership and advisory capacity - leading teams, mentoring staff, advising senior leadership
• Performs all other duties as assigned

Additional Functions / Information

• Work with senior leadership to define product strategy
• Build and manage the roadmap for one of our key products
• Work closely with a high performing cross-functional team to orchestrate product work from kick-off to ship to measuring for success
• Communicates strategy, roadmap, and priorities influentially throughout the organization, ensuring alignment from engineering, marketing, customer support
• Works with the engineering team to balance feature development with quality and internal requirements
• Creates clear design briefs and product requirement documentation for engineering and design teams, keeping the team fully engaged with the most impactful work
• Skillfully uses quantitative data and user research/feedback to inform product hypotheses and drive outcomes for the business
• Responsible for achieving key outcomes you are entrusted with, providing data showing progress on goals

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree or equivalent experience
• Five years of:
  • Experience in project management, product management, education, curriculum, or editorial development roles, or other related experience.
• Complex problem solving to identify complex problems and reviews related information to develop and evaluate options and implement solutions
• Excellent analytical skills to arrange information or actions in a certain order or pattern according to a specific rule or set of rules
• Active listening to give full attention to what is being said, taking time to understand the points being made, asking questions as appropriate, and not interrupting
• Excellent verbal and written communications skills including report preparation and presentation to gather information and share recommendation and outcome
• Excellent critical thinking skills to use logic and reasoning to identify the strengths and weaknesses of alternative solutions, conclusions or approaches to problems
• Deductive reasoning to apply general rules to specific problems to produce answers to make sense
• Excellent judgment and decision-making skills to consider the relative costs and benefits of potential actions to choose the most appropriate one
• Excellent supervision skills to manage staff

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working within an education, education technology, educational publishing, or related academic-oriented organization
• Able to create product definitions and specifications and help capture design decisions, and share the overall product/project vision
• Able to partner and collaborate with a wide variety of team members, customers and other interested parties
• Deliberate decision-maker
• Able to mentor other Product Managers

Rice University is an Equal Opportunity Employer with commitment to diversity at all levels, and considers for employment qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national or ethnic origin, genetic information, disability or protected veteran status.

Current Rice University COVID policies, which include vaccination, face mask, testing, gatherings, occupancy limits, and travel policies can be found here: https://coronavirus.rice.edu/policies