Product Operations Manager

**Purpose**

The Product Operations Manager is accountable for delivering on the promise for product excellence within the product team through the development of scalable frameworks and processes that benefit many users and internal teams. Working hand in glove with cross-functional teams across the organization, you’ll help deliver value through streamlined communications and reporting, simplified processes, enhanced knowledge sharing, and metrics and insights. You’ll lead a newly formed team and lay and execute the vision for product operations to support a large, diverse and global product team.

You’ll be responsible for
- Operationalizing strategic priorities and ensuring execution aligns with business objectives.
- Driving standardization in tooling, governance, and reporting across the product development lifecycle.
- Creating a single source of truth for product data, including business cases, roadmaps, performance metrics, and product lifecycle status.
- Embedding best practices from agile software development to improve delivery speed, prioritization, and visibility.
- Managing the full product lifecycle, including supporting the end-of-life (EOL) process for products being removed from the market.

We are looking for someone who is excited to lead this new discipline and thrives on building durable systems to optimize working processes. Your success is measured by your ability to streamline and generate systemic solutions to problems across wide groups of stakeholders, and your ability to support the goals of your partnering teams.

**Accountabilities**

**Tooling, Processes, & Execution Efficiency**
- Own and improve product tooling
- Standardize reporting & documentation: Establish and enforce knowledge management best practices so teams can easily access and share insights, leveraging AI where appropriate.
- Drive process optimization: Continuously refine how teams move through discovery, prioritization, and execution to minimize bottlenecks and improve alignment.
- Facilitate onboarding & enablement: Train teams on best practices for roadmaps, product requirements, and governance processes, ensuring clarity and consistency in execution.

**Portfolio Management, Governance & End-of-Life (EOL) Programs**
- Implement Airtable as the single source of truth for portfolio tracking, including roadmaps, prioritization, and delivery metrics. Maintain live dashboards on program health, investment ROI, and execution progress to support real-time decision-making.
- Develop a robust Product Portfolio Management (PPM) framework
- Ensure strategic alignment with ELL governance: Partner with the strategy team to align product investments, OKRs, and execution reviews with broader business governance.
- Improve visibility into trade-offs & resource allocation: Implement a data-driven approach to managing prioritization, dependencies, and capacity planning across teams.
- Standardize business case development in Airtable
- Manage end-of-life (EOL) programs for products being sunsetted

**Metrics, Data, & Decision Enablement**
- Define and track Product KPIs: Ensure teams have clear visibility into customer adoption, usage, retention, and revenue impact.
- Own product health & execution metrics
- Support data-driven prioritization: Provide quantitative insights to inform product investments and trade-offs.
- Ensure a single source of truth for product performance: Standardize how teams report on roadmap delivery, financial impact, customer outcomes, and lifecycle status.

**Cross-Team Alignment & Communication**
- Define how Product, Engineering, Design, and Program Managers work together in the Four-in-a-Box (4IAB) model.
- Drive execution transparency: Implement a clear cadence for roadmap reviews, sprint planning, and quarterly commitments.

**Skills/Attributes**
- Proven track record of implementing product operations in a fast-paced, data-driven environment
- Strong knowledge of Agile & Product Management processes in a software-driven environment.
- Expertise in product tooling (JIRA, JIRA Product Discovery, Confluence, Airtable, dashboards, automation tools).
- Experience in operationalizing roadmaps, metrics, governance frameworks, and EOL programs.
- Ability to drive cross-functional collaboration and alignment between Product, Tech, and Business teams.
- Excellent collaboration, with crisp and compelling verbal and written communication skills including presentation skills and listening skills
- Growth mindset and problem solver

**Who we are**:
At Pearson, our purpose is simple: to help people realize the life they imagine through learning. We believe that every learning opportunity is a chance for a personal breakthrough. We are the world's lifelong learning company. For us, learning isn't just what we do. It's who we are. To learn more: We are Pearson.

Pearson is an Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity Employer and a member of E-Verify. We want a team that represents a variety of backgrounds,