A curated list of 200+ organizations with open positions across every business function. Apply your gifts and career to tackle the world’s biggest problems, today!
Youth Impact
Product
Youth Impact is an evidence-based international NGO working in education and health for young people around the world. We partner hand-in-hand with governments to scale high-impact programs through public systems — rigorously testing and refining them to maximize impact and reduce cost. Today, we have close government partnerships and on-the-ground teams in Botswana, South Africa, Namibia, India, and the Philippines, alongside partnerships in many other countries and team members working across the globe. Our diverse global team spans disciplines, backgrounds, and time zones, but we are united by shared values and a commitment to learning. We are now entering an ambitious new phase of global growth, scaling rapidly across new geographies while maintaining the quality and rigor that define our work. We’re looking for people excited to join our mission of ensuring all young people thrive.
Product Manager
Location and contract
Location: Flexible, with preference given to candidates based in one of our innovation hubs: Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, the Philippines, or India.
Contract type: 2-year fixed term contract with potential for extension pending performance.
Application deadline: Rolling until filled
About the role
We are looking for a hands-on Product Manager who can connect technical detail with program strategy and field realities. The role requires strong product judgment, the ability to translate messy operational realities into clear systems behaviors, and enough technical fluency to connect the dots between data engineers, researchers (e.g. in development economics), and field teams. This role will improve the scalability of our education programs by managing innovations that could include interfaces to rapidly digitise field data using AI across our country teams, infrastructure to run A/B tests at scale across our programs, and a two-sided education marketplace app matching tutors and teachers to households, for example.
Key responsibilities
Understanding program and field needs: This includes a deep grasp of how to improve student and parent engagement in education programs, and how to facilitate effective pedagogy to improve learning outcomes.
Connecting dots: This includes connecting field needs and implementation realities to various technical functions, including research and data, as well as engineering and software development.
Driving alignment: Translate ambiguous needs into clear product directions, which includes bringing structure and clarity to multi-stakeholder discussions, driving alignment across engineering, data, research, and operations teams and making thoughtful trade-offs across speed, robustness, simplicity, and scale.
Owning product design end-to-end: Break down complex program workflows into clear product requirements, define system behaviours, design simple, frictionless user flows for low-tech environments and architect every feature as a configurable module from the start
Co-developing architecture: Technical collaboration & light development contribution while working closely with developers to shape technical architecture and integration points, including understanding about both frontend as well as backend components (cron jobs, async workflows, stateful entities). Modify or prototype small scripts in Python or JavaScript when needed. Use tools like Postman, SQL/BigQuery, and logs to test and validate product behavior.
Ensuring product integration: Translate operational or learning objectives into model inputs, outputs, and evaluation logic. Design products, flows around confidence levels, fallbacks, and human-in-the-loop checks. Ensure model behavior aligns with real-world use and program goals.
Execution, testing & release management: Manage sprints, backlog, and release cadence. Run structured testing (functional, regression, edge-case verification). Ensure smooth deployment and post-release monitoring. Take full responsibility for the product after the release. Monitor adoption patterns, investigate under-utilized features, and make the hard decision to deprecate features that add clutter without value
Data & metrics ownership: Define metrics for performance, reliability, usage, and quality. Ensure instrumentation is in place for monitoring and decision-making. Use data to refine rules, flows, and system parameters. Collaborate with data engineering to maintain clean, analyzable pipelines.
Who will thrive in this role
You have 5-7+ years in Product or Engineering Management. You've built product roadmaps from scratch. You have scaled products from prototype to scale
You've designed for low-tech or low-income users
You've worked in resource-constrained environments where you had to make the hard call on what not to build
Comfortable using AI-assisted tools and rapid prototyping approaches to go from idea to testable solution quickly, reducing dependency on full engineering cycles
You have high ownership, structured thinking, and disciplined follow-through as well as the ability to manage multiple product threads simultaneously
Experience in the edtech, education, or non-profit sector will be a plus
Bias toward clarity, reliability, and operational feasibility
Benefits
Benefits include generous annual leave, sick leave, (including global health insurance provisions), various stipends, professional development opportunities, the ability to work remotely, access to our amazing global networks and much more.
