Fractional Product Manager – EdTech Deployment

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About Playlab

Playlab is a tech non-profit dedicated to helping educators and students become critical consumers and creators of AI.

We believe that an open-source, community-driven approach is key to harnessing the potential of AI in education. We equip communities with AI tools and hands-on professional development that empowers educators & students to build custom AI apps for their unique context. Over 60,000 educators have published apps on Playlab – and the impact is growing every day.

At Playlab, we believe that AI is a new design material - one that should be shaped by many to bring their ideas about learning to life. If you're passionate about building creative, equitable futures for students and teachers, we hope you’ll join us.

The Role

Playlab is growing fast—our partnerships now span individual teachers, schools, districts, and ministries of education across multiple countries. But our product infrastructure hasn't kept pace with our partnerships success. We need someone who deeply understands how edtech products actually land in schools and districts to help us close that gap.

We're hiring a Fractional Product Manager to own a focused, high-impact scope: making Playlab work for institutions at scale. This means designing how roster data flows in and out of Playlab, defining a domain model that serves both organizations and individual users, and specifying the admin controls that institutions need to deploy with confidence.

This is a time-limited engagement. You'll work closely with Playlab's CTO, engineering team, partnerships team, and designers to define requirements. You’ll also help shepherd implementation. The exact hours and duration will be determined based on mutual fit.

If you've lived through the pain of deploying edtech at the district level and want to help a mission-driven organization get this right, this role is for you.

What You'll Do

Domain Model Design

  • Design a domain model that enables both institutions (districts, schools, ministries) and individuals (teachers, coaches) to use Playlab successfully

  • Clarify how users, organizations, apps, and permissions relate to each other as Playlab scales

  • Ensure the model supports Playlab's current partnerships while creating flexibility for future growth

Administrative Controls

  • Specify the controls that give institutions visibility and confidence: user management, app distribution, usage reporting, and appropriate content governance

  • Balance institutional needs with Playlab's commitment to educator agency—administrators need oversight without locking down what makes Playlab powerful

  • Work with the partnerships team to prioritize based on what's actually blocking deployments

Rostering & Data Integration

  • Define requirements for getting roster data into and out of Playlab at scale—supporting districts and organizations with varied SIS configurations

  • Specify integration patterns that work across the fragmented K-12 data landscape (Clever, ClassLink, OneRoster, custom exports)

  • Design flows that reduce manual work for IT administrators and partnership teams

You Might Be a Fit If You...

  • Have shipped rostering, SSO, or admin features for a product used in K-12 schools or districts

  • Understand how edtech procurement, IT administration, and classroom deployment work

  • Can translate institutional requirements into clear product specs without over-engineering

  • Write requirements that engineers can build from—you're specific, not hand-waavy

  • Are comfortable working in a fast-moving environment where you'll need to make decisions with imperfect information

  • Care about education and want to help a mission-driven product scale responsibly

Bonus Points For...

  • Experience with SIS integrations (Clever, ClassLink, OneRoster) or identity management in education

  • Background working with districts or state/ministry-level education deployments

  • Familiarity with data privacy requirements in education (FERPA, state student privacy laws)

  • Experience at early-stage edtech companies where you had to build deployment infrastructure from scratch

Why Join Us?

Focused Impact: You'll solve a specific, high-leverage problem that will unlock further growth

Mission-Aligned Work: Playlab is a nonprofit building open, community-driven AI tools for education. Your work directly supports equitable access to AI literacy.

Strong Collaborators: You'll work with a passionate team that includes experienced educators, engineers, and designers who care deeply about getting this right.

Flexible Engagement: Remote work with hours structured around mutual availability.

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