Head of Product

Who We Are:

Paragon One is helping corporations become the classrooms of the future for real work. We're a team out of MIT and YCombinator building scalable remote extern programs to upskill thousands of underrepresented students per year on behalf of corporates like Home Depot, Meta, PwC, HSBC, HP, and National Geographic. After a 6-8 week cohort-based extern program, students earn a certificate from the company and get to put the externship under professional experience on their resume. Nearly 80% of students are from underrepresented (black, hispanic, latinX) backgrounds, and we see 1 in 2 students land Fortune 1000 jobs within 6 months of completing an externship. Our platform and process handles recruiting, training, collaboration, workflow management, and assessment.

Here’s who we’re looking for:

Paragon One is searching for our Head of Product. In this role, you will bring your strong passion for building and scaling innovative software products to a fast-growing edtech company focused on the Fortune 1000 enterprise market. You’ll work closely with our CEO, as well as bring strategic communication and alignment across the product team, engineering team, and broader company around a unified product vision and roadmap.

You will play a key role in Paragon One’s overall product vision and growth through facilitating process, scaling and optimizing our team.

If you were part of our team, here are some things you would have done last week:

1. Modeled our SCOOT values of Sincerity, Collaboration, Ownership, Optimism, and Tenacity
2. Strong leadership and communication skills
3. Used a coaching-mindset to build and develop talent
4. Shown a strong enthusiasm for our mission and passion for the product
5. Cross-collaborated with leadership and Engineering to align on business priorities, roadmap, and trajectory
6. Created and oversaw high-level KPIs for development teams
7. Evaluated business and technology opportunities, identified best practices, and implemented as appropriate to drive continuous improvement
8. Continue to scale and retain talent
9. Conveyed a strong ability as a player/coach who can jump into the code while also maintaining a high level view and understanding

Skills and experience our team needs:

1. 4+ years of experience leading product
2. 7+ years of experience in product
3. Strong leadership and communication skills
4. Ability to pick and lead great talent
5. Coaching-mindset to build and develop talent
6. Strong enthusiasm for our mission and passion for the product
7. Can establish the right processes to empower a product-driven culture — fostering idea sharing, collaboration, creativeness, and experimentation.
8. Can design and articulate a product vision (Bilel: Must have)
9. Can contribute to company strategy (Bilel: Must have)
10. Can obtain a strategic, holistic view of what the right product might be for a given problem space AND then define concrete, coherent products with high business potential (i.e. has a nose for value) (Bilel: Must have)
11. Can demonstrate a ‘user mentality’ and use empathy to relate to user problems, frequent customer needs, and stakeholder expectations. (can feel the pain) (Bilel: Must have)
12. Multidisciplinary – has broad functional knowledge (product, marketing, engineering, operations) and understanding of the entire company (Bilel: Must have)
13. Appreciation of design and can ensure the design process is integrated within the product development process (Bilel: Must have)
14. Data-driven with judgment (Bilel: Must have)
15. Has commercial understanding – business models, pricing, monetization, distribution channels, etc. (Bilel: Must have)
16. Entrepreneurial (ideally a former founder)
17. Enterprise product experience

Bonus points if you have...

Knowledge or experience within the edtech space

Media

1. Yahoo! Finance TV interview: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6797983228197257216/
2. Human Capital Innovations podcast: https://www.innovativehumancapital.com/podcast/episode/2c57482f/s38e23-the-benefits-of-externship-programs-for-the-student-and-for-organizations-with-matt-wilkerson
3. Recruiting Daily Article: https://recruitingdaily.com/remote-externships-the-future-of-student-recruitment/
4. PwC extern highlight video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UtPw6Kud80
5. HP extern highlight video: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/paragon-one_hp-hptechventures-work-activity-6856711255571390464-NV75/