Front Doors Product Manager

KQED•San Francisco, CA

11d•$106,080 - $110,000•Hybrid

About The Position

KQED is seeking a Product Manager to own the performance and day-to-day strategy of its homepage and major landing and section pages—the “front doors” through which visitors discover its journalism. The role combines editorial judgment and product thinking, creating processes, tools, and metrics that help editorial and product teams curate content effectively for a public media audience spanning news, arts, education, and local community coverage. The Product Manager works closely with editorial leadership, engineering, design, analytics, marketing, and events. The role balances breaking news, evergreen content, franchise programming, promotional needs, and strategic priorities while ensuring that important journalism is visible and that the audience experience is effective. The position is a new role and involves building structure and workflows where needed. The position works in a hybrid arrangement between KQED’s newly renovated San Francisco headquarters and remotely. Applicants must currently reside in the San Francisco Bay Area or be willing to relocate. This is a limited-term, full-time position for 18 months. KQED’s stated mission is to provide Northern California residents with a community-supported alternative to commercial media; provide knowledge for informed decisions; convene community dialogue; bring arts to everyone; engage audiences in sharing their stories; help students and teachers thrive in 21st-century classrooms; and expose people of all ages to new people, places, and ideas. KQED describes its organizational culture as centering human dignity, equity, and belonging, with diverse and inclusive storytelling that reflects the Bay Area. It encourages applications from marginalized communities.

Requirements

At least 3 years of product management experience.
Strong editorial judgment or demonstrated ability to partner closely with editorial teams; comfort making news judgment calls collaboratively.
Experience defining and using metrics or analytics to evaluate content or product performance.
Ability to work in ambiguity and build processes and structure where none yet exist.
Excellent cross-functional collaboration skills and ability to communicate across editorial, engineering, design, marketing, and events.
Ability to balance competing stakeholder priorities, including editorial and promotional needs, and make clear, defensible tradeoff decisions.
Familiarity with CMS platforms and how content architecture affects front-end presentation.
Bias toward action balanced with sound judgment; ability to attend to front doors daily and sometimes hourly.
Passion for public media’s mission and KQED’s role serving the Bay Area.
Must currently reside in the San Francisco Bay Area or be willing to relocate.

Nice To Haves

Exposure to media, publishing, content platforms, or audience-facing digital products.

Responsibilities

Own the day-to-day strategy for KQED’s homepage and major landing and section pages, ensuring content placement reflects editorial priorities, audience needs, and real-time news judgment.
Partner with editors and reporters to understand story priority, timeliness, and strategic significance, and translate editorial intent into homepage and landing-page decisions.
Define and evolve workflows, guidelines, and useful tools for consistent, scalable curation, including automated versus manual placement, module rotation, and content lifecycle on high-traffic pages.
Establish and track front-door performance metrics, including engagement, click-through, time-on-page, and downstream conversion, and use data to inform curation strategy and future product investments.
Identify opportunities to improve or automate curation workflows and partner with engineering on tools that reduce manual work without sacrificing editorial nuance.
Collaborate with design on layouts, module types, and page templates that support flexible and effective curation.
Coordinate with Marketing and Events to schedule and place campaigns, member drives, live events, and sponsorships on homepage and landing pages, balancing promotional needs with editorial priorities and audience experience.
Monitor site performance and make appropriate homepage and landing-page adjustments for breaking news, election coverage, and major community events.
Contribute to broader digital product strategy discussions concerning audience discovery, SEO/AIO crawlability, personalization and recommendations, and content distribution across owned platforms.
Perform other related duties as necessary to meet the organization’s ongoing needs.