Product Lead, New Ventures

Nelnet•Remote - Nebraska, NE

6d•$100,000 - $150,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Nelnet Business Services (NBS), a division of Nelnet, Inc., provides payment technology, education services, and learning management solutions to education and faith-based organizations. As a Product Lead in New Ventures, you will own the full product lifecycle for validated business cases, from breaking them into jobs to be done, features, and screens, to defining and prioritizing the MVP, handing off to engineering, iterating based on user feedback, and maintaining the roadmap until the venture is mature enough to be handed to a General Manager (GM) and dedicated team. You will act as the de-facto product manager for new ventures until they scale, requiring both strategic vision and detailed execution. Additionally, you will design the product management processes, documentation, and handoff artifacts to make this repeatable for future ventures. This role offers a hybrid work option, allowing associates living within 30 miles of an office to work remotely part of the week while fostering collaboration through in-office presence three days a week.

Requirements

5–8 years as a PM, with meaningful time at the 0-to-1 stage (taking a problem and turning it into a shipped, iterating product).
Ability to set a product vision and articulate a compelling directional point of view.
Ability to execute the vision by writing specs, running sprints, and making daily product calls.
Demonstrated ability to decompose a high-level problem into jobs to be done, features, user flows, and screen-level specs.
Experience running solution-focused user research (prototype tests, concept walkthroughs, usability sessions) and feeding signal into the roadmap.
Practiced at roadmap prioritization across competing inputs (customer feedback, technical lead times, business constraints) and communicating the logic.
Experience designing or establishing product management processes (spec writing, prioritization, handoffs).
Experience with stakeholder management across functions (engineering, legal, compliance, sales, business unit leaders) without formal authority.
Strong written communication skills.

Nice To Haves

Design fluency—ability to wireframe a flow and make UX calls without waiting for a designer.
Experience running sprints and owning the full scrum process as the PM.
Experience shipping to B2B buyers where legal, compliance, or procurement is in the critical path.

Responsibilities

Take a validated problem statement and break it into customer jobs to be done, conducting solution-focused research (prototype tests, concept walkthroughs, usability sessions) to inform what to build.
Translate jobs to be done into individual features, user flows, and screen-level detail, writing product briefs that make tradeoffs explicit.
Define the MVP and prioritize the roadmap based on customer feedback, technical lead times, and continuous improvement signals, communicating the logic clearly to stakeholders.
Write clear product specifications for engineers with acceptance criteria and explicit tradeoffs, owning the technical handoff.
Run the sprint process, including planning, standups, backlog grooming, and retrospectives.
Feed user feedback and learnings back into the next iteration cycle, deciding what to iterate, rebuild, or cut, and documenting the reasoning.
Identify and involve stakeholders at each stage, communicating product decisions in writing to various audiences.
Anchor prioritization conversations in user signal and represent the product perspective across the organization.
Own the product roadmap through scale, continuing to build, iterate, and maintain the product until a GM and dedicated team are in place.
Design repeatable product management processes, templates, and documentation for spec writing, roadmap maintenance, and user feedback capture.
Execute a structured handoff to an incoming GM, including product vision, roadmap, open decisions, user research, and process documentation.