Senior Product Manager Save

About Basta

Since 2016, Basta has worked with thousands of first-generation college students of color to launch their careers and change the face of leadership in the workforce, resulting in the country's best job placement outcomes.

Through personalized AI-powered career planning, best-in-class coaching, and networking with top 100 employers, New York-based job seekers in Basta’s Fellowship program find great jobs at nearly twice the rate of their peers. Our Powered By Basta program is scaling this impact through game-changing analytics and online support that supercharges colleges’ career success programs so students nationwide can accelerate their professional journey.

Scope and problem

American undergrads are facing a job market beset by systemic underemployment. The problem is especially severe for the nearly 5 million first-generation college students: only 44% of first-gen students of color land a job that requires their degree, and only 20% earn a living wage within a year of graduation. 

These trailblazers have the smarts, skills, and experience to land a job that leverages their degree, pays well, and forges a path to a thriving career. Basta partners with colleges, nonprofits, and employers to build that bridge of opportunity.

About the Role

To date, much of the Basta magic has been about the power of human connection between students and their coaches, and students and their fellow job-seeking peers. We don’t believe tech can or should replace these connections, but rather turbocharge it.

As such, we are currently making a series of major investments in how our digital product supports the needs of career seekers in our program. Our vision is an “always-on” and personalized digital hub that offers asynchronous learning opportunities and cutting-edge tools to discover and apply to good-fit job opportunities faster. Success looks like meeting every student wherever they are on their job seeking journey, accelerating their learning and skill-building, and boosting confidence and motivation in order to increase application focus and volume, ultimately helping students to land- and accept!more good-fit job offers.

We're looking for a Senior Product Manager who will own the roadmap to bring that hybrid learning model into reality, measuring impact via job seeker outcomes, customer success, product adoption and revenue growth. This is a senior individual contributor role and an exciting opportunity to join a mission-driven team focused on scaling Basta’s impact and to play a key role in positioning our digital platform as a key driver of growth for the organization over the next 5 years.

Students say things like this about their experience with the overall program- “Basta has demystified so much of the process and has connected me to a supportive community who understands the many unspoken experiences and challenges of being a first-generation college graduate.”

If you’re already asking yourself, how might we leverage technology to demystify the job-seeking process for even more f irst-gen students and authentically scale this supportive community … let’s talk!

Start date: July 2024

Location: NYC preferred; ability to commute to NYC regularly, i.e. 2-4x/month, required

Salary Range: $120,000-$160,000 is the hiring salary range

In this role you will…

• Lead a dual-track software development process to understand and prioritize user problems and the optimal way to solve them, ensure the solutions developed create intended impact, while measuring and iterating along the way.
• Plan, lead, and synthesize qualitative and quantitative user/customer research (from no-code conceptual prototypes to beta testing)
• Collaborate closely with the program/curricular team to shift from a fully live instructional model to a hybrid, by strategically prioritizing learning goals and content that is best suited for digital channels.
• Work cross-functionally across the organization to ensure the product/engineering team’s work has a positive impact on our customers and users. This includes ensuring stakeholders understand what you are doing, why you are doing it, and that you have factored their ideas and/or concerns into that thinking.
• Drive growth through both incremental improvements as well as strategic big bets, with autonomy to make feature level decisions and ability to influence more fundamental core product decisions with leadership.
• Drive product strategy and cross-functional execution for our flagship digital product, leading (but not managing) a distributed cross-functional team that includes frontend & backend engineering, design, marketing, curriculum design, operations
• Deliver delightful user experiences and innovative AI solutions that directly impact organization goals and set the industry bar
• Serve as a thought leader, drawing on your deep understanding of user needs, business goals & the broader landscape of digitally-enabled higher ed / workforce development readiness offerings

We’re looking for candidates who bring most of these characteristics…

• Mission-driven: You believe deeply in the inherent value and potential first-generation grads bring to the workplace
  and are excited to build a product that supports them in achieving their career goals
• Relevant Product Management Expertise: 5+ years of product management experience at the “post-MVP, pre-scale”
  stage of a D2C or B2B2C organization, understanding of digital learning and modern gamification best practices
• Outcome-oriented: Not reactionary, articulates the desired outcome and works proactively and collaboratively to
  create a path to achieve it
• Technically fluent: you’re able to understand and describe the technical underpinnings of the products you own at a
  high level
• Strong product and design sense: you understand best practices in product design, and can translate deep user
  empathy into intuitive and engaging product experiences that align with our product and business goals, obsession
  with delightful user experience, and ability to bridge the online and offline world
• Prior experience designing and implementing usage analytics and reporting tools that can scale alongside a growing
  user base.
• Excellent executor: you know how to Get Things Done under tight constraints, including making tough tradeoffs and/or
  getting scrappy when needed, without sacrificing core product or organizational values.
• Exceptional communicator: you can articulate ideas and concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences with
  ease, and know when and how to best communicate to different stakeholders to make progress and keep people
  informed
• Exceptional collaborator: you know how to work with a broad set of cross-functional partners, from career coaches to
  curriculum designers to sales and operations, and can manage stakeholders at all levels of the organization

Our Product/Design/Engineering Culture

You will be joining a nimble and growing team focused on impact over output. You will work closely with 2 engineers and 1 product designer (mix of FTE and contracted through a product agency partner). You will also work alongside (and have the opportunity to mentor) 1 product manager who is early on in their career. This team is highly collaborative and fully empowered to implement the principles of continuous discovery with regular, sustained user feedback loops, using a variety of research and prototyping tools and methods to test and refine hypotheses.

Clear vision and strong strategy are core principles within the Product organization. We value product managers who fully own the long-term vision—knowing where we are going and importantly why it matters for our customers. As strategy is meant to evolve, you will need to constantly identify increments, spot and mitigate risks, and position the areas of the product you are responsible for to meet users’ needs in a way that are simultaneously viable for Basta.

We celebrate being accountable to real impact, which means keeping our end-user front and center throughout the product life-cycle in order to ultimately bring to market solutions that meaningfully change the trajectory of the job search process and position Basta on the leading edge of innovation.

Our team is integral to making Basta’s vision a reality—we’re creating a world where a college degree provides equitable access to a choice-filled life. Our staff comes from all backgrounds of for-profit career paths, education, and ethnicities and we’re looking for passionate team players to help us scale.

The Tangible Good

We offer a competitive compensation and benefits package* which includes medical, dental, vision, short-term disability, long-term disability, life insurance, retirement matching, paid parental leave, and more. We also offer a generous paid time off policy, including 15 paid vacation days (20 paid vacation days after your first year), all federal holidays and an end of year shutdown annually.

*Basta reserves the right to change benefits at any time according to business need.

**Applicants must be authorized to work for any employer in the U.S. Basta is unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an
employment Visa at this time.

**Basta does not currently cover the cost of relocation.