Product Manager

About Niche

Niche is the leader in school search. Our mission is to make researching and enrolling in schools easy, transparent, and free. With in-depth profiles on every school and college in America, 140 million reviews and ratings, and powerful search tools, we help millions of people find the right school for them. We also help thousands of schools recruit more best-fit students, by highlighting what makes them great and making it easier to visit and apply.

Niche is all about finding where you belong, and that mission inspires how we operate every day. We want Niche to be a place where people truly enjoy working and can thrive professionally.

About The Role

Every year, over half of all college-bound high school seniors come to Niche to figure out where they belong.  For many of those students, this is the most consequential decision they’ve made in their lives.  Niche’s mission is to make that process easy, transparent, and free for all of them.  To do that, we’ve built out a robust set of tools to help them find the right schools, guide them through the enrollment process, and understand the full financial picture.  

This role exists to own the registered student relationship end to end: what happens after someone completes registration, why they come back, and how useful Niche stays to them over the course of their enrollment journey.  

What You Will Own

• The post-registration lifecycle. Activation into first real value, and the ongoing reasons a student returns to Niche. You define what a healthy registered student looks like at each stage of their journey and will be accountable for moving those cohorts in partnership with our marketing team across both our web and app experiences. 
• Re-engagement across surfaces. Improving our lifecycle messaging, push notifications, and personalized recommendations in collaboration with marketing.  Deciding what we send, to whom, when, and just as importantly what we stop sending.
• Personalization and matching quality. Making the logged-in experience more contextually relevant and delightful than the anonymous one. School recommendations, saved-list intelligence, scholarship and cost matching that dynamically updates the experience to reflect what we actually know about a student.
• Balancing student experience with business needs. Grow the amount of data related to student interest and disinterest to both power a more relevant experience for them and unlock actionable insights for our college partners to drive revenue. 
• Cross-team dependencies. The registered student experience has a broad surface area intersecting with many teams and areas of ownership. You'll spend time getting alignment with other product teams and cross-functional partners, identifying opportunities for mutual benefit with other roadmaps you don't directly control.

What You Will Do

Within 3 Months:

You understand the registered student funnel cold: where students drop between account and full registration, what our real return-rate curves look like by acquisition source and device, and which re-engagement surfaces are actually working. You've talked to students. You've shipped tests that have already begun moving the needle on engagement and retention. 

Within 6 Months: 

You have a solid understanding of the full student journey and how that differs by segments and personas.  You’ve taken learnings from the current enrollment cycle hits and misses and developed a clear strategy for what the most important metrics to move are based on correlation to business value and how you intend to move them. 

Within 12 Months: 

The registered experience for the next enrollment cycle is measurably better than the previous one based on student engagement and retention patterns.  Students come back more, they go deeper in the experience and the data they generate is creating more value for our college partners.  

What We Are Looking For

• Comfort with ambiguity and real ownership. This role will own a broad surface area with many plausible strategies.  You’re comfortable being the one making the difficult decisions about where to focus our time and energy, and then backing that up or changing course based on evidence 
• Rigor with data and experimentation.  You have a strong background in data and can understand SQL - even when AI is the one writing it.  You know the difference between a cohort curve and a monthly active user count, and have designed experiments that connect the dots between leading metrics and long-term user outcomes
• Product craft and deep user empathy.  You’ve been hands on with user research and partner closely with design to deeply understand user problems and how to solve them.  You have a strong point of view about what a good consumer experience feels like, and can tell the difference between an experience improving and a vanity metric going up
• Fluency with AI as a product capability and a working tool. You’ve shipped products where an AI model was doing meaningful work - that might be personalization, matching, content generation, document understanding - and can speak to how you evaluated cost and quality tradeoffs.  You also use AI tooling in your own workflows to move faster on research, analysis and shaping product bets.  You have opinions about where it helps and where it produces confident slow
• Genuine investment in our problem space. Niche exists to make researching and enrolling in schools easy, transparent, and free. A lot of our users are the first in their family to navigate this process. You don't need a background in education, but you should care that the students who can benefit most from our product are the ones least likely to have other sources of support
• An ability to think in systems.  Our product is a 2-sided marketplace and we support a broad range of students.  Decisions that seem simple on the surface can have wide-ranging impacts on those students or our college partners.  You have a demonstrated ability to think beyond the immediate impact, weigh second order effects and make high-quality decisions 

Nice to haves

• Background in a two-sided marketplace where you balanced consumer and business-customer needs
• Experience with influencing short-term metrics to drive decision-making outcomes over long time horizons like the multi-year journey of college enrollment
• Familiarity with the college search, admissions, or financial aid landscape
• Experience with consumer-facing products for teenagers

Compensation 

Our national target base salary range is $133,000-$167,000, plus participation in our Annual Bonus and Stock Option Program. Base compensation will be commensurate with experience and skills.

At Niche, our Total Rewards Philosophy is centered around creating a workplace environment that attracts, motivates, and retains top talent by providing a comprehensive and competitive rewards package.  This philosophy is built on the principles of performance-based compensation, best-in-class benefits and work-life balance, and employee well-being.

Interview Process

Candidate experience is a top priority for our talent and hiring teams.  We believe in providing a transparent, authentic and comprehensive interview process where you have the opportunity to learn about us while we get to know you and your experience.  The interview process is outlined here:

• Phone Screen with Talent Acquisition Partner - 30 Minutes

• Video Interview with Hiring Manager - 45 Minutes

• Case Study - 60 Minutes (candidates presented with a relevant product problem and given up to 3 days to build a case study - presenting to a cross-functional group including engineering, design, and CPO)

Why Niche?

• We are a fully flexible workforce empowering our employees to choose to work remotely, in our Pittsburgh office or whatever combination suits you
• Full time, salaried position with competitive compensation in a fast-growing company
• Best-in-class 100% paid employee health plan, including vision and dental and supplemental coverage
• Flexible Paid Time Off Policy
• Stipend that allows you to build your work from home office in a style and function that suits your personal preferences
• Parental leave for all employees (12 weeks fully paid) in addition to short term disability for birthing parents
• Meaningful 401(k) with employer match
• Your ideas and work will make an immediate impact on our company and millions of users
• You will join a team that cares about you, our mission, our work - and celebrates our wins together!

Niche will only employ those who are legally authorized to work in the United States without sponsorship now or in the future for this opening.  

We are currently hiring in states where we currently have employees: AZ, CO, CT, DE, FL, GA, IL, IN, KY, LA, ME, MD, MA, MI, MO, NE, NV, NH, NJ, NY, NC, OH, OK, OR, PA, SC, TN, TX, VA, WA, DC, WV.

Candidates only.  No recruiters or agencies, please. Sorry, we do not offer relocation assistance.

Niche is an equal opportunity employer committed to fostering an inclusive, innovative environment with the best employees. Therefore, we provide employment opportunities without regard to age, race, creed, color, national origin, ancestry,  marital status, affectional or sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, disability, nationality, sex, or any other protected status in accordance with applicable law.

All interviews are being held remotely. If there are preparations we can make to help ensure you have a comfortable and positive interview experience, please let us know.