Product Operations Manager

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 educators & students to build custom AI apps for their unique context. Over 100,000 educators have published apps on Playlab.

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 seeks a Product Operations Manager to join our growing team. This role will be the connective tissue across our Product organization. This role will be filled by someone who can see around corners, spot where a process is breaking down before it becomes an issue, and build the systems that empower engineers, product managers, and designers to do their best work.

The Product Operations Manager’s mission is to enable product teams to focus on building great products. They improve how the Product organization operates day to day by ensuring the right systems, documentation, coordination channels, and insights are in place. They also support hiring across the Product organization. The role combines building new systems, improving existing ones, and hands-on execution, working directly with the Product leadership team.

Responsibilities

• Product operations model execution and support:

  • Manage product intake and readiness from initial request through discovery, planning, delivery, and launch.
  • Maintain product workflows, tools, documentation, and reporting so teams have the information they need to make decisions and move work forward.
  • Coordinate launch readiness across Product, Design, Partnerships, and Support, including launch calendars, go/no-go reviews, communications, compliance, and post-launch tracking.
  • Manage research operations, including participant recruitment, research intake, scheduling, documentation, and a searchable repository of findings.

• Product hiring and candidate experience:

  • Coordinate the hiring process for Product roles, from application review through interviews, debriefs, and offers.
  • Keep candidates informed and ensure interviews are scheduled, prepared, and run consistently.
  • Prepare interviewers with the right context, materials, and evaluation criteria.
  • Organize debriefs and capture feedback so the team has the information needed to make sound, timely hiring decisions.
  • Track candidates through the process, identify delays, and keep the pipeline moving.

• Data & Insights:

  • Build and maintain dashboards to help PMs and leadership make evidence-based decisions.
  • Drive consistent reporting for key product health metrics (adoption, retention, engagement, etc) for Playlab overall and for the product teams.

Qualifications

• 7+ years experience building organizations, programs, or functions from scratch (not just optimizing existing ones)
• Track record of operating across organizational boundaries and building trust quickly in new contexts
• Ability to translate between technical/product teams and field-facing/user-facing teams
• Comfort with ambiguity and willingness to own problems before they're well-defined
• Familiarity with product development processes and the product/engineering interface
• Familiarity with business processes and needs including financial sustainability
• Strong communication skills, especially in remote-first environments