Principal Product Manager
brightwheel · United States
Our Mission and Opportunity
Early education is one of the most important determinants of childhood outcomes, a critical support for working families, and a $175B market that remains underserved by modern technology. Brightwheel is the largest, fastest growing, and most loved platform in early ed, trusted by millions of educators and families every day. We are a three-time Cloud 100 company, backed by top investors including Addition, Bessemer, Emerson Collective, Lowercase Capital, Notable Capital, and Mark Cuban.
Our Team
Our team is passionate, talented, and customer-focused. We embody our Leadership Principles in our work and culture. We are a distributed team with remote employees across every US time zone, as well as select offices in the US and internationally.
Who You Are
You're an AI-native product leader and builder who thrives in high-ownership environments. You're energized by the full spectrum of the job — from iterating on live features to investing in greenfield 0→1 bets — and you have the judgment to know when to pursue each. You're comfortable in ambiguity, decisive under pressure, and relentless about customer and business impact.
You will succeed in this role if you are:
Focused on customer and business impact. You care about creating real value for educators and families, and about proving a business that's worth growing
A practitioner-builder. You don't lead from a distance. You use AI and modern tooling in your own work to build, prototype, and learn, and to show what great looks like
Motivated by ownership. You want a large surface area and the full portfolio that comes with it — from finding product-market fit and proving out a business model on a 0→1 bet, to removing pain points on existing, heavily used features
A generalist by instinct. You're drawn to whichever problem matters most right now, and you don't need the problem space to be familiar to make progress in it
What You’ll Do
Brightwheel sits at the center of early education, trusted by tens of thousands of schools and millions of families. We have more high-value opportunities than we have product managers, and you'll own one of them end to end.
The most likely starting point is enrollment — how schools fill their open seats and keep the families they already have. A center licensed for 50 children running at 42 is leaving real money on the table every month, and today the work of chasing inquiries, running tours, and confirming re-enrollment happens across inboxes and spreadsheets. Some of what schools need already exists in brightwheel. Some of it doesn't. You'll build both, and build the business around it.
This is an individual contributor role with significant scope — one of the broadest product mandates at brightwheel, with direct partnership with our CEO and executive team from day one.
In this role, you will:
Own the vision, strategy, and execution for a high-impact product area — from growing what already works to defining and launching what doesn't exist yet
Make the case for where we invest next, with evidence — including what to stop
Set appetite, scope accordingly, and hold your team to a high bar on speed, quality, and customer impact
Shape pricing and go-to-market for new capabilities you launch — from packaging to validating willingness to pay
Drive AI into the product in ways that genuinely improve outcomes for providers, staff, and families — not as a checkbox
Define success metrics, track performance, and communicate progress and tradeoffs clearly to leadership
Partner tightly with engineering and design to ship with urgency, unblock the team, and keep them focused on what matters
Contribute to brightwheel's product culture — raise the bar for product quality, velocity, and customer impact
What You've Done
We are open to a variety of backgrounds, but qualified candidates usually bring:
A record of building products customers love. You have the product taste and judgment to know what to build and what to leave out, and the customer empathy to find real needs before the data exists
Something taken from 0→1. You've built something new and gotten it to real customer pull, and you can point to the signal that proved it
Proven ownership of complex, cross-functional product initiatives with measurable customer and business outcomes
Strong product judgment and prioritization. You know what to work on, what to cut, and can drive alignment while balancing speed, quality, and learning
Communication and presence. You can set a vision, align an executive team, and inspire the builders who join you
Applied AI in your own work. You use AI and modern tooling to build and ship faster, and to go deeper across disciplines
Experience building and shipping AI-powered product features (bonus)
SaaS background, especially in products with complex operational workflows (bonus)
What Sets You Apart
The candidates who will thrive in this role go beyond strong product management:
You are a multidisciplinary builder. You move across product, design, engineering, and data, and you use AI to go deeper in each
You thrive in ambiguity. You make confident calls when there is no playbook and no data, and you follow the data the moment it exists
You think like an owner of the business, from the customer problem to the path to business impact, and you bring an executive team along with a clear, compelling vision
Brightwheel is committed to creating a diverse and inclusive work environment and is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status.
Protecting Our Applicants: Please be aware of recruiting scams impersonating Brightwheel. All legitimate communications come from @mybrightwheel.com addresses, and we never ask for payment or sensitive personal data as part of our hiring process. If you suspect fraudulent contact, reach out to security@mybrightwheel.com. Thank you for helping us keep our applicant community safe.