Role: Principal Product Manager (IC)
Location: Chicago | Hybrid (3 days in office)
Type: Full-time
What you'll be doing
- Frame real problems and find the shortest path to proving or disproving them
- Combine qualitative insight with quantitative data to guide priorities
- Work closely with design, engineering and ops to ship, learn and repeat
- Define success metrics that link to business outcomes
- Keep improving how we do product at Zen through better tools, habits and feedback loops
You'll be in the thick of it: shaping, testing, talking to users, untangling blockers and helping the team focus on what moves the needle.
🧩 The kind of PM we're looking for
The kind who's calm in the chaos and curious in the unknown.
You're a natural mediator who can hold multiple perspectives, keep your head when others are flapping, and help a team find alignment without fuss. You know when to lead and when to let others run with it.
You're also a restless learner. You collect ideas and frameworks for fun. You're at your best when something is fuzzy and needs shaping into something testable. You get itchy when there's too much uncertainty and have a near-compulsive need to turn ambiguity into action. Once it's clear enough, you move fast.
You're probably happiest when you're learning, shipping and seeing tangible change.
The experience we think helps
There's no single route, but it'll help if you have:
- 10+ years building and scaling digital products or systems with measurable impact in a marketplace business, and for extra credit, in EdTech or adjacent verticals or a hybrid physical and digital environment
- Experience running discovery, experiments and delivery end-to-end across a portfolio of product lines
- Setting strategic goals and driving delivery of products or experiences which achieve them
- Comfort working with data (spreadsheets, dashboards, BI systems or SQL if needed)
- Strong collaboration with engineers, designers, operations, sales and growth teams
- Evidence of making complex problems and systems simple and usable
What you'll get
- Work that directly improves children's futures
- Competitive salary and stock options
- 25 days holiday plus bank holidays
- Health and life insurance
- Cycle to Work and Electric Vehicle schemes
- Coaching and development support
- A culture that values clarity, pace and sustainability alongside human kindness and understanding
How we hire
We keep it simple:
Intro chat - a real conversation, not a quiz
Product deep dive - how you think, what you've built, what you've learned
Competency and behavioural based interview
Task and meet the team!
We'll tell you what's great, what's still messy and where you'll have an impact. We expect you to do the same.
If you're excited by the idea of building the machine that gets the right educator into the right classroom at the right time, let's talk.
