Product Manager

Primer (Microschools); San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Significant equity

100% health insurance

Life insurance

Daily lunch

Job summary

Primer is building a new school system in San Francisco, empowering teachers and operators with simple, scalable software. As Product Manager for Operations, you will own the portfolio from strategy to launch, partnering with design, engineering, and school operators to turn the messy reality of running campuses into reliable, human-centered tools.

You’ll spend time in schools, understand how work actually happens, and push for AI-enabled workflows that reduce repetitive tasks while

Qualifications

• 5+ years of product management experience.
• Experience building products for complex, physical workflows.
• Strong ownership. You can take an ambiguous problem, figure out what matters, make decisions, and drive it through adoption and impact.
• Resourceful and creative. You generate options, learn scrappy ways to progress.
• Comfort working in messy, real-world environments with operators.
• Analytical enough to reason from data, practical enough to trust field insights.
• Strong opinions, loosely held, ready to adjust with new facts.
• Clear writing and structured thinking.
• Excited to work on-site in San Francisco.

Responsibilities

• Turn the daily reality of running schools into simple, useful products.
• Build systems that help teams understand campus health and surface issues before they escalate.
• Reduce administrative work for educators and help operators scale across a growing network.
• Own the Operations product portfolio from strategy through launch, adoption, and iteration.
• Spend time with campus leaders, educators, and central operators to identify bottlenecks and collaborate with Design and Engineering to solve them.
• Aim for simple, intuitive, and joyful experiences for all users and scale products for growth.

Skills

Product management

Complex workflows

Ownership

Resourceful

Operational empathy

Analytical thinking

Clear communication

On-site SF

Job description

About Primer

Primer is a growing network of K–8 schools restoring the timeless foundations of American education. Inspired by the original teaching primers that shaped a nation of readers, thinkers, and builders, our schools begin with what has always worked, and build for what lies ahead. Close-knit learning environments. Skilled educators. A culture that takes kids seriously as learners and leaders.

Primers shaped the first 200 years of American children. Primer will ready them for the next.

Role Overview

We're looking for a Product Manager to help build the software, AI, and data layer that powers how Primer operates.

As Primer grows, our biggest challenge is operating many more excellent schools without scaling people and bureaucracy alongside them. That efficiency is what keeps Primer affordable for every family. This role is about turning the messy, magical reality of schools into systems that make Primer more consistent, more scalable, and more human. Every minute we give back to a teacher is a minute spent with kids.

This role is based in our San Francisco office, working closely with product, engineering, operations, and academic teams — and spending time inside our schools with teachers, understanding how they actually work.

You’ll join a small, high-ownership team that works close to students, families, educators, and operators. We value clear thinking, honest feedback, strong craft, and a bias toward action.

You’ll work closely with design, engineering, and school operators to solve problems that have never been solved before. The goal is to build simple, intuitive, and joyful experiences for all our users and scale our products for our next phase of growth.

What you'll do

Primer faces some of the hardest (and most exciting!) problems in education. You'll take the daily reality of running schools and turn it into simple, useful products. That might mean building systems that help teams understand campus health, surface issues before they escalate, reduce administrative work for educators, or help operators make better decisions across a growing network.

You’ll own the Operations product portfolio, from strategy and discovery through launch, adoption, and iteration. You’ll spend time with campus leaders, market teams, educators, and central operators to understand where work breaks down, then partner with Design and Engineering to solve it.

Expect to run time studies on campus and obsess over the 30 seconds tech can hand back to a teacher.

You’ll be expected to form a point of view quickly, make tradeoffs with imperfect information, and keep things moving as you learn.

Your job is to answer questions like:

• How do we operate 10x more schools with only 2x the operational headcount?

• How do we know when a campus needs support before it becomes obvious?

• How can AI reduce repetitive work while strengthening human judgment?

• How do we make school operations feel lighter, clearer, and more consistent for the people doing the work?

As one of the early product leaders at Primer, you'll help set the standards for how we build products, how we use AI, and how software changes the way our schools operate.

What we're looking for

• 5+ years of product management experience.

• Experience building products for complex, physical workflows.

• Strong ownership. You can take an ambiguous problem, figure out what matters, make decisions, and drive it through adoption and impact.

• Resourceful and creative. You generate options, find scrappy ways to learn, and don’t need a large team or perfect process to make progress.

• Comfort working in messy, real-world environments. You like sitting with operators, watching how work actually happens, and finding the hidden bottlenecks.

• Analytical enough to reason from data, practical enough to know when the truth is in the field.

• Strong opinions, loosely held. You can develop and defend a point of view, but you actively look for evidence that you’re wrong and change your mind when the facts change.

• Clear writing and structured thinking.

• Excited to work on-site in San Francisco.

Something Extra: We value diverse backgrounds — whether in education, healthcare, logistics, marketplaces, compliance, field operations, or something entirely different. Anything that taught you how complex human systems really work.

Why join Primer

We’re building something really hard — a new school system. The product challenges are incredibly varied and you’ll use every skill in your toolkit. Watch our CEO Ryan talk about the inspiration, the challenges, and the impact we’re having: YouTube Interview.

As a fast-growing startup, we offer salary commensurate with experience, plus significant equity and comprehensive benefits including 100% health insurance, life insurance, and daily lunch.

• significant equity
• 100% health insurance
• life insurance
• daily lunch

Primer is a mission-first company. We believe our mission is the highest-leverage way we can create positive change. In service of that, we keep work centered on mission execution and avoid social or political activism at work that’s unrelated to the mission.