Role: Senior Product Manager (IC)
Location: Chicago | Hybrid (3 days in office)
Type: Full-time
🧭 What "product" means here
At Zen, "product" doesn’t stop at the software. The software is one part of a much bigger system that connects schools, teachers, data and processes.
Sometimes the right answer is a feature. Sometimes it’s an operational tweak, a better metric or a mindset shift that changes how people work. You’ll care more about the outcome than about what shape the solution takes.
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:
- 5-8 years building and scaling digital products or systems with measurable impact in a marketplace business, and for extra credit, in EdTech or adjacent verticals.
- Experience running discovery, experiments and delivery end-to-end.
- Comfort working with data (spreadsheets, dashboards, SQL if needed).
- Strong collaboration with engineers, designers and operations.
- Evidence of making complex systems simple and usable.
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.
