VP of Product and Partnerships

uConnect is on a mission to improve access to career services to help more people realize their potential — early in their lives and throughout their careers.

Focused on the US higher education market, uConnect's All-In-One Virtual Career Center is used by leading institutions like UCLA, MIT, and Baton Rouge Community College to transform the career services experience and radically scale career engagement, readiness, and outcomes.

We're a mission-driven team working in a fun and collaborative culture that puts people first. We operate as a fully remote organization, encouraging mobility and empowering all employees to work from their ideal environment

About the Role

As VP of Product and Partnerships at uConnect, you will own the bridge between strategic vision and product reality. Reporting directly to the CEO, you will define and drive a clear, prioritized roadmap, leading the full product lifecycle from discovery through delivery, while building the content partnerships and platform integrations that extend uConnect's value to students and institutions.
You will lead customer discovery, shape feature prioritization, and work closely with engineering to ship a product that delivers measurable outcomes for career services teams and the students they serve. You will bring executive presence, deep market understanding, and strong internal communication to a role that sits at the intersection of product, partnerships, and commercial strategy.

• Product Strategy & Roadmap: Partner closely with the CEO to translate product vision into a clear, sequenced roadmap with defined milestones, priorities, and success metrics. Own the development and grooming of specific product requirements and communicate roadmap direction clearly across the ELT, engineering, and customer-facing teams.
• Market & Customer Intelligence: Inform the roadmap by developing a deep understanding of customers and market dynamics. Run focus groups, user interviews, customer testing, and structured beta programs. Combine direct customer engagement with a working knowledge of the higher education and workforce ecosystem, strategic buyers, and technology trends to make sharp, well-grounded prioritization decisions.
• Strategic Partnerships: Own all aspects of uConnect's partnership strategy, including content partnerships and platform integrations. Identify, evaluate, and manage relationships with content providers, technology partners, and integration vendors whose offerings enhance the student and career services experience within the Virtual Career Center.
• Internal Enablement & GTM Alignment: Serve as a strong internal communicator and product champion. Support Customer Success, Marketing, and Sales with product messaging, value pitch development, and internal enablement to ensure every customer-facing team can speak confidently to what uConnect builds and why.
• Engineering Collaboration: Bring sufficient technical understanding to collaborate effectively with engineering leadership on planning, scope, sequencing, and delivery. Define requirements and communicate priorities clearly to ensure smooth handoffs throughout the development lifecycle.
• Product Monetization: Bring a track record of implementing monetization strategies and nuanced ideas for expanding monetization within the Virtual Career Center. Partner with Finance and the CEO on packaging, pricing, and feature tiering, including usage-based, outcomes-based, and add-on models, ensuring the roadmap reflects both customer value and commercial opportunity.
• AI & Innovation: Own the product roadmap for AI-powered features and develop a clear vision for leveraging AI internally across product and design operations to scale team capacity and accelerate delivery. Drive a framework for responsible, customer-informed AI product development in the higher education context.
• Data Architecture & Strategy: Bring a strong point of view on how to evolve uConnect's Virtual Career Center into a data-driven platform. Lead the product vision for outcomes data, engagement analytics, and institutional reporting that positions uConnect as essential infrastructure rather than a discretionary tool.
• Thought Leadership: Build and maintain a presence in the higher education, career services, and edtech space. Bring a network, a voice, and the credibility to represent uConnect externally and attract the right partners, customers, and talent.
• Team Leadership: Build and mentor a high-performing product team. As uConnect scales, you will establish the organizational practices, documentation standards, and cro