Sr Director Product

Ascend Learning, LLC•Burlington, OR

8d•$192,300 - $275,000•Remote

About The Position

Ascend Learning, a leading healthcare and learning technology company, is seeking a Senior Director of Product Management to lead the strategy, team, and outcomes for a portfolio of Allied Health product lines. This role operates at the intersection of healthcare education, technology, commercial strategy, and people leadership. The ideal candidate will have strong product instincts, a proven ability to develop those instincts in others, and a demonstrated record of identifying new product bets and developing them into measurable commercial wins. The company is building a product-led culture and seeks leaders who will help shape it. Ascend Learning values high transparency, high ownership, and a strong preference for written communication and asynchronous alignment.

Requirements

10+ years of progressively responsible relevant experience, with demonstrated commercial impact in product management or software engineering within product-led technology companies.
Ability to show the quantifiable impact your product work has had on the P&L of a business or business unit.
5+ years managing teams of product managers in a product-led technology company, with a track record of developing PMs into stronger, more independent operators.
A track record of driving the launch of new products with measurable commercial impact — you can point to specific launches and the revenue, retention, or expansion results that followed.
Demonstrated ability to partner equally well with Engineering, GTM, Finance, and Legal to develop products that are both commercially viable and genuinely solve customer pain points — and that hold up through commercial contracting and procurement with customers.
Significant, specific examples of using AI to solve practical business problems and build commercial products — you can speak concretely to the business value created, not just the technology used.
Sharp product sense, sharpened further by having taught it to others.
Deep technical acumen. You can credibly assess technical trade-offs, sequencing, and architecture decisions in partnership with Engineering leadership, even though you don't need to write code yourself.
Quantitative rigor. You're fluent in both technical and business data, comfortable defining metrics, running experiments, and reasoning from evidence at the portfolio level.
Exceptional written and verbal communication — able to write a sharp strategy memo, run a tight portfolio review, and present to a C-suite or Board audience with equal effectiveness.
Comfort with ambiguity and organizational complexity — you can operate without a full playbook, make good decisions under uncertainty, and course-correct quickly when you're wrong.

Nice To Haves

Experience in education technology, healthcare, or a regulated industry where deep domain knowledge creates durable product advantage.
Prior exposure to healthcare education, clinical training workflows, or healthcare credentialing.
Experience owning revenue outcomes, pricing decisions, or a P&L at the product-line level.
History of operating across multiple customer personas (e.g., institutional buyers, administrators, and end users simultaneously).
Advanced degree (MBA or related) — not required, but a plus given the strategic and commercial scope of the role.
Experience with analytics tools (e.g., Amplitude, Mixpanel, Tableau, SQL) is a plus.

Responsibilities

Define and own the multi-year product vision and annual strategy across the Allied Health product lines grounded in market dynamics, customer insight, and Ascend's strategic priorities.
Identify and prioritize new growth vectors for the portfolio, new products, adjacent markets, partnerships, or business models.
Treat pricing, packaging, and positioning as strategic levers, not fixed constraints to unlock adoption, retention, or revenue growth.
Set a compelling narrative for the portfolio that makes the “why” clear and inspires aligned action across teams.
Support unified portfolio-level prioritization and make hard trade-off calls across multiple product areas, with clear reasoning that's visible to your team and to leadership.
Build a repeatable discipline for testing new growth bets by piloting, measuring, and scaling ideas.
Balance near-term commercial pressure with platform investment and long-term strategic bets, and defend that balance credibly in front of senior stakeholders.
Hire, coach, and manage teams across multiple brands including product managers, content developers and product engineers holding a high bar for both product craft and commercial judgment.
Create a bench strong enough that the product line thrives even when you're not in the room.
Manage / Build the operating rhythm, standards, and review cadence that make your team better with clear expectations for discovery rigor, requirements quality, and outcome ownership.
Own a track record of taking new products from concept to launch to durable commercial results.
Define the commercial thesis for each major bet: what impact it should have on revenue, retention, or expansion, and hold the team accountable to it post-launch.
Partner with Finance to build and defend business cases, pricing models, and investment trade-offs for the portfolio.
Drive measurable growth and total addressable market expansion to achieve organizational strategies.
Partner as a peer with Engineering on sequencing, technical investment, and architectural trade-offs.
Shape positioning, packaging, pricing, and launch strategy with GTM teams; personally represent the product line in key customer and sales conversations.
Own the commercial case for product bets, including margin, cost-to-serve, and revenue impact, before and after launch, with Finance.
Anticipate the contracting, data, security, and compliance terms that determine whether a product actually closes and renews with institutional customers, with Legal.
Bring a track record of using AI to solve real business or customer problems and to create commercial value.
Have sufficient technical fluency in AI/ML approaches to partner credibly with engineering and data science on feasibility, design tradeoffs, and build-vs-buy decisions.
Identify where AI genuinely improves the product's value proposition or unit economics, and make the call on where it doesn't (yet) justify the investment.
Ensure AI-enabled features meet the data privacy, accessibility, and content-quality standards required for an education audience.
Set the bar for your team's use of AI in product development, discovery, and decision-making, grounded in evidence of business impact.
Define leading and lagging success metrics for portfolio initiatives, and ensure your team instruments products to measure them.
Own the performance of the growth portfolio: retention, engagement, activation, NPS, and revenue contribution.
Report on portfolio performance with clear, data-grounded storytelling to senior leadership.
Define and measure efficacy metrics that demonstrate how the portfolio measurably improves customer and learner outcomes.