Product Operations Manager

Job Description

Product Operations Manager | Zen Educate

The Tone:
This is a full-time role at Zen Educate, located in London, United Kingdom, with a hybrid work model (3 days in office). Zen Educate uses technology to improve the education system, helping schools save money and educators find fulfilling work. This role is crucial for scaling the Product & Technology team, designing and refining the operational machine that delivers outcomes for schools and educators efficiently. You will product-manage how products are built, focusing on impact and reducing friction.

The TL;DR
• Role: Full Time
• Type: Full-time
• Location: Hybrid – London, United Kingdom

• Team: Works within the rapidly growing Product & Technology team, reporting to the Chief Product Officer.
• Mission: Architect and refine Zen Educate’s product development operating model to ensure high-velocity, Mission-based delivery of commercial and human impact at scale.
• Tech Stack: BI systems, product analytics

What You’ll Actually Do
• Guardian of our Ways of Working: Own and refine Zen Educate’s Mission-based deployment model, ensuring teams move from “Pitch” to “Launch” with maximum autonomy and minimum bloat.
• Manage the “Single Front Door”: Run weekly Triage sessions, acting as the gatekeeper for business requests to ensure they are framed as clear Missions with a business case before reaching the Investment Committee.
• Own the “Single Pane of Glass”: Maintain the central dashboard of core metrics (our HUD), ensuring Product Managers have self-serve access to data needed to prove their Mission’s impact.
• Standardize Rituals: Refine “Mission Control” and “Waypoints” to establish a clear rhythm of progress for the team without a calendar full of empty meetings.
• Operational Glue: Work closely with Design, Engineering, and Growth to ensure smooth product launches, total cross-functional alignment, and deliver the “Weekly Pulse” to keep the wider company informed.

The Must-Haves
• Background: This is a Manager-level role requiring core domain knowledge in Product Operations, Product Management, or Business Operations.
• Experience: 4+ years in relevant fields, with a track record of scaling systems with measurable impact, and experience navigating the “messy middle” of a fast-growing company (Series B/C/D).
• Skills: Data Literacy (comfortable working with BI systems and product analytics to turn raw data into a strategic narrative); Change Management (track record of optimizing development lifecycles and managing a modern product tech stack); Communication (evidence of making complex systems simple and usable for diverse teams); Systems Thinking (identifying inefficiencies and building repeatable habits); Pragmatic Mediation (holding multiple perspectives and fostering alignment without fuss).