Senior Product Manager

Covista is America's largest healthcare educator, serving more than 97,000 students and supported by a community of 385,000 alumni across five accredited institutions. Through personalized, tech-enabled education powered by 10,000 faculty and colleagues, Covista expands access to healthcare careers and addresses the U.S. healthcare workforce shortage at scale.

About the role

This role exists to determine the best way to solve validated business problems through Innovation & AI. The Innovation & AI Product Incubation Lead transforms strategic opportunities into validated Innovation & AI solutions through discovery, experimentation, prototyping, and pilot execution. This leader owns the end-to-end incubation process — from discovery and user research through POC/prototype, solution definition, proven hypothesis, and transition into Product Engineering for productizing the solution. The role partners closely with Innovation & AI Product Strategy, Innovation Engineering, Product Families, UX, Architecture, and Engineering to reduce delivery risk before future investment into productizing the solution. It is a highly collaborative, inward-facing product leadership role focused on building the right solution, validating assumptions quickly, and ensuring Product Engineering receives well-defined, execution-ready initiatives.

Core Mission: Answer one question: What is the best solution to this business problem, and is it worth scaling? This role leads discovery, validates customer and business assumptions, prototypes solutions, and prepares initiatives for successful transition into Product Engineering.

What Success Looks Like in Year One

• A repeatable discovery-to-prototype process that consistently surfaces whether an idea is worth building, fast
• A track record of clean handoffs — Product Engineering accepts what it receives without reworking the problem
• POC & Prototypes that produce a clear, data-backed answer on whether to scale, pause, or sunset

Responsibilities

Product Discovery

• Conduct user research
• Define product vision
• Validate user problems
• Validate opportunities identified through Innovation & AI Product Strategy

Product Incubation

• Lead design thinking workshops
• Build product hypotheses
• Validate desirability, feasibility, and viability
• Define an experimentation strategy to determine the Minimum Marketable Product (MMP) needed to validate business value

Innovation & AI Solution Definition

• Partner with Innovation & AI engineers
• Define Innovation & AI use cases
• Evaluate Innovation & AI capabilities
• Define data requirements
• Assess technical feasibility
• Manage Innovation & AI risks

Product Leadership

• Create PRDs
• Prioritize discovery activities, prototypes, and POC learning
• Define user stories
• Establish success metrics
• Partner with UX
• Drive iterative learning

Pilot Leadership

• Define pilot strategy
• Lead pilot execution
• Measure adoption
• Validate business outcomes
• Refine based on learning

Transition to Product Engineering

• Recommend readiness for transition into Product Engineering based on validated customer, technical, and business outcomes
• Partner with Product Families
• Support engineering execution
• Ensure knowledge transfer
• Remain engaged through delivery
• Support enterprise rollout
• Continue partnering through delivery to protect validated assumptions and intended business outcomes

Requirements

• Bachelor's Degree (required) and Master's Degree (preferred)
• Ten (10) plus years of professional experience, preferably with supervisory experience
• Experience leading Innovation & AI Products
• Track record of leading successful teams that generate consistent revenue growth, implementing programs, and developing competitive response campaigns
• Critical thinking and problem-solving skills
• Strong teamwork, negotiation, and delegation capabilities
• UX research experience
• Progressive responsibilities including managing complex issues, preferably in a dynamic, high-pressure culture demanding high-quality thinking and output
• Superior team skills with proven ability to collaborate successfully with all organizational functions and levels
• Excellent problem-solving and strategic thinking abilities
• Ability to influence and partner with internal and external customers
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Experience building MVPs

Schedule

We operate on a hybrid schedule with four in-office days per week (Monday–Thursday). This approach enhances creativity, innovation, communication, and relationship-building, fostering a dynamic and collaborative work environment.

Pay

The expected salary range for this position is between $80,336.75 and $140,851.54. Actual pay will be adjusted based on job-related factors permitted by law, such as experience and training; geographic location; licensure and certifications; market factors; departmental budgets; and responsibility.

Benefits

• Health, dental, vision, life, and disability insurance
• 401k Retirement Program + 6% employer match
• Participation in Covista’s Flexible Time Off (FTO) Policy
• 12 Paid Holidays
• Annual incentive program (eligibility subject to program rules and performance factors)