VP of Product and Partnerships at Gouconnect

uConnect is on a mission to improve access to career services to help more people realize their potential — early in their lives and throughout their careers. Focused on the US higher education market, uConnect's All-In-One Virtual Career Center is used by leading institutions like UCLA, MIT, and Baton Rouge Community College to transform the career services experience and radically scale career engagement, readiness, and outcomes. We're a mission-driven team working in a fun and collaborative culture that puts people first. We operate as a fully remote organization, encouraging mobility and empowering all employees to work from their ideal environment     About the Role As VP of Product and Partnerships at uConnect, you will own the bridge between strategic vision and product reality. Reporting directly to the CEO, you will define and drive a clear, prioritized roadmap, leading the full product lifecycle from discovery through delivery, while building the content partnerships and platform integrations that extend uConnect's value to students and institutions. You will lead customer discovery, shape feature prioritization, and work closely with engineering to ship a product that delivers measurable outcomes for career services teams and the students they serve. You will bring executive presence, deep market understanding, and strong internal communication to a role that sits at the intersection of product, partnerships, and commercial strategy. Job Responsibilities • Product Strategy & Roadmap: Partner closely with the CEO to translate product vision into a clear, sequenced roadmap with defined milestones, priorities, and success metrics. Own the development and grooming of specific product requirements and communicate roadmap direction clearly across the ELT, engineering, and customer-facing teams. • Market & Customer Intelligence: Inform the roadmap by developing a deep understanding of customers and market dynamics. Run focus groups, user interviews, customer testing, and structured beta programs. Combine direct customer engagement with a working knowledge of the higher education and workforce ecosystem, strategic buyers, and technology trends to make sharp, well-grounded prioritization decisions. • Strategic Partnerships: Own all aspects of uConnect's partnership strategy, including content partnerships and platform integrations. Identify, evaluate, and manage relationships with content providers, technology partners, and integration vendors whose offerings enhance the student and career services experience within the Virtual Career Center. • Internal Enablement & GTM Alignment: Serve as a strong internal communicator and product champion. Support Customer Success, Marketing, and Sales with product messaging, value pitch development, and internal enablement to ensure every customer-facing team can speak confidently to what uConnect builds and why. • Engineering Collaboration: Bring sufficient technical understanding to collaborate effectively with engineering leadership on planning, scope, sequencing, and delivery. Define requirements and communicate priorities clearly to ensure smooth handoffs throughout the development lifecycle. • Product Monetization: Bring a track record of implementing monetization strategies and nuanced ideas for expanding monetization within the Virtual Career Center. Partner with Finance and the CEO on packaging, pricing, and feature tiering, including usage-based, outcomes-based, and add-on models, ensuring the roadmap reflects both customer value and commercial opportunity. • AI & Innovation: Own the product roadmap for AI-powered features and develop a clear vision for leveraging AI internally across product and design operations to scale team capacity and accelerate delivery. Drive a framework for responsible, customer-informed AI product development in the higher education context. • Data Architecture & Strategy: Bring a strong point of view on how to evolve uConnect's Virtual Career Center into a data-driven platform. Lead the product vision for outcomes data, engagement analytics, and institutional reporting that positions uConnect as essential infrastructure rather than a discretionary tool. • Thought Leadership: Build and maintain a presence in the higher education, career services, and edtech space. Bring a network, a voice, and the credibility to represent uConnect externally and attract the right partners, customers, and talent. • Team Leadership: Build and mentor a high-performing product team. As uConnect scales, you will establish the organizational practices, documentation standards, and cross-functional workflows needed to sustain product excellence. Required Skills & Experience • 7+ years of product management experience, including 3+ years in a senior or leadership role at a SaaS company. • Demonstrated ability to translate executive vision into a structured, sequenced product roadmap with clear priorities and measurable outcomes. • Proven track record of owning product requirements end-to-end, from discovery and grooming through delivery and adoption. • Experience running customer research programs including focus groups, user interviews, surveys, and beta testing, with a demonstrated ability to turn customer and market insights into roadmap decisions. • Strong technical understanding sufficient to meaningfully inform roadmap planning and engage credibly with engineering teams in an agile or lean development environment. • Data-driven approach to prioritization and decision-making, with comfort using both qualitative and quantitative inputs. • Executive presence and strong internal communication skills, with the ability to align cross-functional teams and influence at all levels of the organization. • Experience working in a fast-paced, startup or scale-up environment where adaptability and ownership are essential. • Familiarity with modern product tooling (e.g., Jira, Linear, Productboard, Figma, Notion, or equivalents). • Track record of implementing product monetization strategies, with nuanced ideas about packaging, pricing, and expanding revenue within an existing customer base. • Experience building or managing content partnerships and technology integrations, including evaluating partners, negotiating agreements, and managing ongoing relationships with content providers and platform vendors. • A clear vision for applying AI to both product features and internal product and design operations to scale team capacity. • Strong point of view on data architecture and how to evolve a SaaS platform into a data-driven solution that creates defensible long-term value. • Demonstrated thought leadership, network, or external influence in the higher education, edtech, or career services space. • Background in higher education, edtech, career services, or workforce development is strongly preferred. Candidates with direct experience building products for universities, community colleges, or workforce development organizations are highly encouraged to apply. What You'll Get • Remote work and flexible schedule • Gold PPO health insurance with nation-wide networks covered at 100% for employee premiums and 60% for dependents • Dental insurance covered at 75% for employee premiums and 50% for dependents • Vision insurance covered at 75% for employee premiums • Optional Health and Dependent Care FSAs • One Medical Primary Care Membership • 100% vested 401(k) with 100% of employee contributions matched up to the first 3% of pay and 50% of employee contributions matched on the next 2% of pay, after a 90-day waiting period • Employer-paid $50,000 basic life insurance policy • Unlimited paid vacation time • Quarterly mental health days • 12 weeks paid parental leave after one year of employment • Home office stipend • Equity participation in uConnect’s stock option program What Else Should You Know? At uConnect, we care deeply about our people. We know that a properly incentivized and highly motivated team is critical to our success and seek to ensure our employee experience reflects that. We offer competitive compensation, including participation in a generous employee equity stock option program, a wide range of employee benefits, and are always committed to being an equal-opportunity employer.    Interested but not sure you’re the right fit? If this sounds like a company you would like to join but this may not be the right role, please don't hold back from reaching out. Whatever skills you bring to the table or background you're coming from, we welcome you to start a conversation with us. Just use the subject line: "General Interest."