Senior Product Program Manager

Pearson; Frankfort (KY); On-site; USD 140,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Pearson is seeking a Lead Specialist in Higher Education to own a product program from planning through launch, coordinating across Product, Engineering, UX, Content, and Go-to-Market. You will drive roadmaps, dependencies, risks, and outcomes with senior stakeholder alignment.

This senior individual contributor role requires hands-on delivery, strong communication, and a focus on measurable outcomes. You will operate with global, distributed teams and report into the Higher Education portfolio

Qualifications

• 10+ years of program or technical program management experience in a technology, product, or software organization.
• 5+ years leading complex, multi-team programs from planning through launch.
• Technical understanding and strong engineering collaboration.
• Experience owning program roadmaps, delivery schedules, and cross-team dependencies across multiple product and engineering teams, including distributed teams in different time zones.
• Ability to influence senior leaders without direct authority, manage escalations, and hold a recommendation under pressure.
• Comfort using delivery data to define success criteria, run status, and drive decisions.
• Strong written communication and facilitation.

Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end program plan across product, engineering, UX, content, and go-to-market, and the OKRs it delivers each quarter.
• Own prioritization tradeoffs with Product and Engineering leads.
• Drive delivery schedules and launch readiness across multiple teams, including globally-distributed teams, and anticipate bottlenecks before they reach the critical path.
• Surface dependency risk early, before it blocks another team, and elevate with a recommendation attached.
• Build strong working relationships with Engineering, Product, UX, Content, Finance, and go-to-market partners across US and international teams.
• Write and maintain the program charter: scope, milestones, success criteria, and the metrics that show whether it worked.
• Keep the program's documentation current so pages, plans, and links reflect the actual state of the program.
• Track open action items, decisions, and commitments across your program and drive follow-through.
• Run your program's planning cadence, quarterly reviews and annual planning, with pre-reads before any meeting that carries a decision.
• Drive clear decisions and communication
• Adopt and advance program standards for roadmap governance, communication templates, and status reporting, and collaborate closely with peers on dependencies.
• Keep status current in Jira and Jira Product Discovery (JPD) and drive data quality
• Maintain the plan, program transparency, and ensure JPD and Jira reflect the real plan: priorities, dependencies, and cut lines.
• Use delivery data such as cycle time, throughput, and OKR health to frame status and decisions.
• Find ways to use AI-assisted tools to reduce program overhead and improve the delivery insight available to the team.

Skills

Program management

Technical collaboration

Roadmapping

Cross-team leadership

Stakeholder management

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience

Technical background helpful

Tools

Jira

Confluence

Jira Product Discovery

Job description

Pearson is seeking a Lead Specialist in Higher Education to own a product program from planning through launch, coordinating across Product, Engineering, UX, Content, and Go-to-Market. You will drive roadmaps, dependencies, risks, and outcomes with senior stakeholder alignment.

This senior individual contributor role requires hands-on delivery, strong communication, and a focus on measurable outcomes. You will operate with global, distributed teams and report into the Higher Education portfolio