Sr. Product Manager, Product Design & User Research, Sophia Learning

The Sr. Product Manager, Product Design & User Research, Sophia Learning serves as a senior product and design technology leader, responsible for defining and executing the long-term vision for Sophia Learning’s product ecosystem. This is a role for someone who has both managed products and designed them hands-on, owning product outcomes while personally doing the research and design work. This role drives the strategy that makes Sophia Learning’s platform user-centric, scalable, intelligent, and future-ready - centralizing customer data insights, enabling predictive analytics and experimentation, and applying artificial intelligence to enhance every aspect of the learner and partner experience.

Operating at the intersection of product strategy, user experience design, and AI innovation, this leader partners with senior executives, business partners, data scientists, and engineering leaders to deeply understand user behavior and identify opportunities to move Sophia towards our future vision for learning, including implementing an agentic-enabled design system and driving the strategic application of AI across all Sophia Learning products.

The Sr. Product Manager, Product Design & User Research, Sophia Learning operates as a senior leader in the product organization, influencing company-wide priorities, mentoring product peers, and aligning investments to Sophia Learning’s mission of expanding opportunity and access through education. Beyond design execution, this role owns the voice of the customer and carries accountability for experience direction: building a continuous discovery practice that shapes which problems Sophia should solve and securing executive alignment through research evidence and trade-off analysis rather than consensus.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

• •Define and lead the multi-year product strategy for the user experience of Sophia’s online learning platform, ensuring alignment with business goals and executive priorities.
• •Establish and lead a continuous discovery and user research practice (interviews, usability testing, surveys, journey mapping) that keeps Sophia close to its learners and institutional partners, synthesizing research, behavioral data, and market signals into problem statements, personas, and prioritized opportunities.
• •Guide the organization’s AI product vision and roadmap, collaborating with engineering, data science, and product leaders to align AI initiatives across multiple product areas.
• •Lead initiatives to embed machine learning, natural language processing, and generative AI models into core Sophia Learning applications, driving automation and intelligent user experiences.
• •Serve as a strategic advisor to executive leadership, translating research insights and technical opportunities into business value and influencing portfolio-level decisions.
• •Establish design best practices and design review mechanisms that ensure consistent quality across the product.
• •Own end-to-end experiences across learner, partner, and administrative workflows, translating user needs and business goals into flows, wireframes, and high-fidelity designs and partnering with Engineering to ensure design intent reaches production with a high bar for quality and accessibility (e.g., WCAG 2.1 AA).
• •Oversee the design and delivery of a scalable, governed design system that centralizes design assets, establishing design standards, documentation, and accessibility models that make the system AI-ready for agentic development.
• •Partner with Engineering, Data/Analytics, and AI teams to implement UX success metrics and an experimentation framework that supports predictive analytics, personalization, and automation.
• •Mentor and coach other Product Managers, elevating design thinking, product strategy, and customer-centric thinking across the team, including research methods and rapid prototyping with the design system and agentic development tools.
• •Represent Sophia Learning as an industry thought leader, contributing to the company’s credibility in AI for online learning, ethical AI, and data-driven learning experiences.

Job Skills:

• •Deep expertise in product design, user research, AI-driven product strategy, and large-scale platform systems.
• •Proven ability to lead research and translate customer insight into product direction, influencing what gets built, not only how it looks.
• •Equally comfortable defining requirements, prioritizing a backlog, and owning delivery as personally producing wireframes, high-fidelity designs, and prototypes.
• •Strong understanding of modern design and prototyping tools, component-based design systems, accessibility standards, and component lifecycle management, including structuring design systems for agentic development and AI coding tools.
• •Proven ability to bridge technical depth and executive influence, communicating complex technical concepts with clarity and confidence, and turning research findings into decisions.
• •Demonstrated success leading cross-functional AI initiatives that span design, data engineering, product, and data science.
• •Skilled in defining AI governance frameworks and human-centered AI design principles, ensuring responsible, compliant use of data and models.
• •Exceptional leadership and mentoring skills; able to develop product talent and foster a culture of innovation, accountability, and technical and design excellence.
• •Thought leadership in AI design strategy, personalization, and data ethics, with a focus on driving measurable impact for customers.

Work Experience:

• •6+ years of product design and/or product management experience in SaaS, data platform, or AI-driven product environments, including hands-on design work (user flows, wireframes, high-fidelity UI) and ownership of product outcomes for complex, cross-functional product areas. EdTech experience preferred.
• •Proven track record leading product design initiatives, including customer-facing AI initiatives, from concept through implementation preferred.
• •Working familiarity with cloud data ecosystems (GCP, AWS, or Azure) and modern data and AI tools, sufficient to partner credibly with data science and engineering teams on feasibility, sequencing, and trade-offs. Hands-on depth is welcome but not required. Experience with behavioral analytics and experimentation tools preferred.
• •Demonstrated success collaborating with executive stakeholders and technical leaders to deliver transformative business outcomes required.

Experience establishing or scaling a research or continuous discovery practice, including research that changed a roadmap decision preferred.

Education:

Bachelor’s degree in Design, Human-Computer Interaction, Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, Cognitive Science, Learning Science, or a related field, (Master’s preferred) or equivalent work experience.

Certificates, licenses and registrations:

• •Generative AI Solution Development (preferred)
• •Product strategy or continuous discovery coursework (e.g., Reforge, Pragmatic Institute, Continuous Discovery Habits) (preferred)
• •Accessibility certification (e.g., IAAP CPACC) (preferred)

Other:

• •Must be able to travel occasionally should a business need arise. For most roles travel would not be common. Travel may involve plane, car or metro. In accordance with ADA policies, reasonable accommodations regarding travel limitations can be provided. Travel will be more common for roles such as Account Executives (25 - 50%), senior leaders (10 – 20%) or Capella Core Faculty (5 – 10%).
• •Ability to work onsite in Corporate or Campus location (in a typical office environment) may be required based on role. If so, this would include being mobile within the office, including movement from floor-to-floor using elevators or stairs.
• •If offsite or hybrid role, must have access to work in setting which enables meeting all requirements of the role (including privacy, reliable internet access, phone, ability to video c