Principal Product Manager (IC)

Job Description

Principal Product Manager (IC) | Zen Educate

The Tone:
This is a full-time, individual contributor role at Zen Educate, located in Chicago with a hybrid work model (3 days in office). Zen Educate leverages technology to connect schools and educators, aiming to ensure every child has the right teacher at the right time, thereby saving schools money and improving educational outcomes. The company is scaling rapidly, and this Principal Product Manager role is crucial for building the underlying systems and processes to deliver these positive outcomes consistently and at scale across the UK and US. This position is central to transforming inefficiency into a more effective education system.

The TL;DR
• Role: Full Time
• Type: Full-time
• Location: Hybrid – Chicago, Illinois, USA
• Mission: This person will build the machine that keeps delivering the outcome of the right educator in the right classroom at the right time at scale.

What You’ll Actually Do
• Problem Framing: Frame real problems and find the shortest path to proving or disproving them.
• Data-Driven Prioritization: Combine qualitative insight with quantitative data to guide priorities.
• Collaborative Delivery: Work closely with design, engineering, and operations to ship, learn, and repeat.
• Success Metrics: Define success metrics that link to business outcomes.
• Product Process Improvement: Keep improving how Zen does product through better tools, habits, and feedback loops.

The Must-Haves
• Background: Principal Product Manager (IC). This role requires an outcome-obsessed, data-savvy Product Operator who thrives in the intersection of product, people, and process, acting as an individual contributor focused on building and solving complex problems.
• Experience: 10+ years building and scaling digital products or systems with measurable impact in a marketplace business. Experience running discovery, experiments, and delivery end-to-end across a portfolio of product lines. Proven ability in setting strategic goals and driving delivery of products or experiences which achieve them.
• Skills: Comfort working with data, including spreadsheets, dashboards, BI systems, or SQL if needed. Strong collaboration with engineers, designers, operations, sales, and growth teams. Evidence of making complex problems and systems simple and usable. A natural ability to mediate, hold multiple perspectives, and help a team find alignment while remaining calm in ambiguity. A restless learner who turns uncertainty into action quickly.
• Bonus: Experience in EdTech or adjacent verticals or a hybrid physical and digital environment.