Principal Product Manager

The Principal Product Manager is accountable for the product vision, coherence, and value of the group’s AI-enabled products. The role ensures that products are deeply aligned to learning priorities, clearly differentiated, and deliver measurable impact for teachers, learners, and schools. Acting as the senior product authority, the Principal Product Manager sets direction across the product portfolio, balances discovery and delivery, and ensures strong alignment between learning needs, user experience, and technical execution.

ISP Principles

• Begin with our children and students. Our children and students are at the heart of what we do. Simply, their success is our success.
• Wellbeing and safety are both essential for learners and learning. We are consistent in identifying potential safeguarding and health & safety issues and acting and following up on all concerns appropriately.
• Treat everyone with care and respect. We look after one another, embrace similarities and differences and promote the well-being of self and others.
• Operate effectively. We focus relentlessly on the things that are most important and will make the most difference.
• Are financially responsible. We make financial choices carefully based on the needs of the children, students and our schools.
• Learn continuously. Getting better is what drives us.

Key Responsibilities

• Product Strategy and vision (core focus)
  • Define and own the long-term product vision and strategy for ISP AI portfolio.
  • Ensure products are clearly aligned to learning priorities and group strategy.
  • Make intentional trade-offs to maximise value, focus, and impact.
  • Maintain coherence across multiple products, capabilities, and roadmaps.
• Learning & user-centred product design
  • Champion a deep understanding of teachers, learners, and school leaders.
  • Ensure product decisions are grounded in learning impact, not just features.
  • Lead a strong discovery discipline using research, insight, and data.
  • Ensure accessibility, inclusion, and simplicity are core product principles.
• Portfolio & roadmap ownership
  • Own and prioritise the product portfolio roadmap, balancing short-term delivery and long-term evolution.
  • Align roadmaps with engineering capacity, transformation timelines, and school adoption plans.
  • Ensure dependencies and sequencing are clear across products and platforms.
• Product leadership & ways of working
  • Set standards for product management practice across the team, managing a small team of 2 Product Managers.
  • Coach and support Product Managers to develop strong product judgement and craft.
  • Embed clear decision-making, prioritisation, and outcome tracking.
  • Work closely with engineering, design, learning, and transformation colleagues.
• Value, outcomes & impact
  • Define clear success measures for products, including adoption, usage, and learning impact.
  • Ensure feedback loops inform continuous improvement.
  • Support benefit realization and post-launch learning.

Skills, Qualifications and Experience

• Experience
  • 8+ years in product management, with at least 3 years in senior roles managing multiple cross-functional teams.
  • Proven success leading AI or EdTech product development from concept to scale.
  • Experience working with distributed teams, including nearshore and offshore development partners.
  • Experience in EdTech or a strong understanding of challenges and opportunities within the education sector.
• Skills
  • Strong understanding of AI/ML technologies and cloud platforms (AWS, Microsoft Azure).
  • Familiarity with agile methodologies and tools (Scrum, Kanban, Jira, etc.).
  • Exceptional leadership, organisational, and communication skills, with the ability to influence stakeholders at all levels.
  • Clear strategic thinker with strong product intuition.
  • Comfortable making and owning difficult prioritisation decisions.

ISP Commitment to Safeguarding Principles

ISP is committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children and young people and expects all staff and volunteers to share this commitment. All post holders are subject to appropriate vetting procedures, including an online due diligence search, references and satisfactory Criminal Background Checks or equivalent covering the previous 10 years’ employment history.

ISP Commitment to Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging

ISP is committed to strengthening our inclusive culture by identifying, hiring, developing, and retaining high-performing teammates regardless of gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation and gender expression, age, disability status, neurodivergence, socio-economic background or other demographic characteristics. Candidates who share our vision and principles and are interested in contributing to the success of ISP through this role are strongly encouraged to apply.