Principal Product Manager, Education

mybrightwheel.com; United States; Remote; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

Brightwheel, a leader in early education technology, is seeking an AI-native product leader to drive the platform's next wave of growth. You will combine world-class product taste with deep customer empathy to transform a first product line into a scalable business.

You will lead by example, building with AI, and creating clarity in ambiguous spaces. You care about teachers, parents, and state stakeholders, moving with founder-like urgency to deliver impact at scale.

Qualifications

• Track record of building products customers love.
• Experience taking an idea from 0 to 1 or 1 to 10 with real traction.
• Ownership of the full business model, pricing and economics.
• Applied AI in your own work to accelerate delivery.
• Strong communication and executive presence to align teams.

Responsibilities

• Own the education business end to end, from product-market fit in new segments to scale.
• Discover teachers, directors, parents, and district buyers' needs and ship the first version quickly.
• Prove the business case: value, model, and economics for growth.
• Prototype and learn hands-on using AI and modern tooling.
• Collaborate with the CEO and executive team to set vision and drive Board-visible outcomes.
• Recruit, inspire, and grow the team around successful bets.

Skills

AI product leader

Customer empathy

Product discovery

Cross-functional leadership

Prototype with AI

Tools

AI tooling

Job description

Our Mission and Opportunity

Early education is one of the most important determinants of childhood outcomes, a critical support for working families, and a $175B market that remains underserved by modern technology. Brightwheel is the largest, fastest growing, and most loved platform in early ed, trusted by millions of educators and families every day. We are a three-time Cloud 100 company https://www.forbes.com/lists/cloud100/a, backed by top investors including Addition, Bessemer, Emerson Collective, Lowercase Capital, Notable Capital, and Mark Cuban.

Our Team

Our team is passionate, talented, and customer-focused. We embody our Leadership Principles https://mybrightwheel.com/about/ in our work and culture. We are a distributed team with remote employees across every US time zone, as well as select offices in the US and internationally.

WHO YOU ARE

You are an AI-native product leader and builder who combines world-class product taste, deep customer empathy, and high standards with the drive to build something new, and you want that something to matter. You create clarity in ambiguous spaces, turn a first product line into a real business, and lead by example in how modern products get built. You care about the teacher who opens the app at 7:25 with nine toddlers arriving, the parent who wants to know their child is learning, and the state official who has to show what a year of funding bought. You move with the urgency and ownership of a founder.

YOU WILL SUCCEED IN THIS ROLE IF YOU ARE

• Here for the mission. You want the outcome measured in what children learn and what teachers can do, and you know that a business that grows is how that outcome reaches millions of children instead of thousands.
• Focused on customer and business impact. You care about creating real value for families and educators, and about proving a business that can grow into something meaningful for brightwheel.
• A practitioner-builder. You do not lead from a distance. You use AI and modern tooling in your own work to build, prototype, and learn, and to show what great looks like.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

The years before kindergarten shape everything that comes after, and early education is where the gap between children first opens. brightwheel sits at the center of it, trusted by tens of thousands of schools and millions of families, with the distribution and profitable core most founders never get to start with. Our education business is where that trust turns into outcomes: curriculum that gives a teacher a plan for the day, assessments that show a parent how their child is growing, and professional development that helps teachers get better at one of the hardest and least supported jobs in education. States and districts fund these years, set the standards, and need to see results against them. Entire companies exist to do just one of these pieces. None of them also runs the school.

The opportunity now is to make education brightwheel's second core business, ten times its current size, and to put a real curriculum, a real measure of growth, and real training in front of children, teachers and families who have never had them: new segments, from states and districts to the smallest programs; new models, from digital subscriptions to multi-year contracts; and products that improve what children learn, on top of running the programs that teach them.

You will lead that work. You will take education from early traction to product-market fit in segment after segment, building with your own hands and with AI, and proving both the product and the business behind it. The mission reaches more children only if the business grows.

IN THIS ROLE, YOU WILL

• Own the education business end to end, from product-market fit in new segments into scale.
• Discover what teachers, directors, parents and district buyers truly need, build the first version, and get it in front of real people quickly.
• Prove the business behind each bet: the value to customers, the model, and the economics that make it worth growing.
• Build hands-on, using AI and modern tooling to prototype, learn, and raise what a small, focused team can accomplish.
• Work directly with our CEO and executive team, set the vision and drive outcomes visible at the Board level.
• Recruit, inspire, and grow the team around the bets that take off.

WHAT YOU'VE DONE

We are open to a variety of backgrounds, but qualified candidates usually bring:

• A record of building products customers love. You have the product taste and judgment to know what to build and what to leave out, and the customer empathy to find real needs before the data exists.
• Experience taking something from 0 to 1 or 1 to 10. You have started or built something new, ideally to real traction, and ideally as a founder or early builder who wore every hat.
• Ownership of the whole business. You have carried the value, pricing, and economics that turn an idea into something worth scaling.
• Applied AI in your own work. You use AI and modern tooling to build and ship faster, and to go deeper across disciplines.
• Communication and presence. You can set a vision, align an executive team and board, and inspire the builders who join you.

WHAT SETS YOU APART

• You are a multidisciplinary builder. You move across product, design, engineering, and data, and you use AI to go deeper in each.
• You thrive in ambiguity. You make confident calls when there is no playbook and no data, and you follow the data the moment it exists.
• You think like an owner of the whole business, from the customer problem to the path to revenue, and you bring an executive team and a board along with a clear, compelling vision.

Brightwheel is committed to creating a diverse and inclusive work environment and is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status.