Portfolio Manager (Remote)

Overview

We believe in the power and joy of learning

At Cengage, our employees have a direct impact in helping students around the world discover the power and joy of learning. We are bonded by our shared purpose — driving innovation that helps millions of learners improve their lives and achieve their dreams through education.

Cengage’s Higher Education business supports learning and student success by providing materials and digital solutions to faculty and students enrolled in two-year, four-year and vocational programs. We currently serve more than 10 million of the 18 million students in US higher ed. Setting a new standard of service for our customers, we deliver quality, easy-to-use course materials from textbooks and eBooks to courseware such as MindTap and WebAssign. In the US, we offer Cengage Unlimited and Cengage Unlimited for Institutions. We help instructors be better teachers, we help institutions solve problems and we empower students to leverage the power and joy of learning to transform lives.

Our culture values inclusion, engagement, and discovery. We recognize the value of diverse perspectives in everything we do, and strive to ensure employees of all levels and backgrounds feel empowered to voice their ideas and bring their authentic selves to work.

Portfolio Manager role

The Portfolio Manager (PM) is a Cengage School Portfolio Management role. The PM creates product strategy by understanding the audience, analyzing the market and competitive trends, developing hypotheses, testing ideas in the market, processing data, and ultimately making product design decisions based on these insights and evidence. The PM leads product development, collaborating with team members to ensure on-time delivery of high-quality learning experiences. They also clearly articulate the features and benefits of a product to the market, enabling the creation and delivery of compelling messaging for target audiences through measurable campaigns and programs. This role will support the Career and Technical Education portfolio in the School market.

What you’ll do here:

• Lead a profitable product line and develop strategic business plans.
• Provide product leadership, representing the portfolio and customers across audiences.
• Use data to make market-informed business proposals, take mitigated risks, and guide strategic decisions.
• Define long-term goals based on research and trends, and set metrics-driven milestones, making connections across datasets and courses to devise solutions to complex business challenges.
• Balance experience, market knowledge, and insights to make impactful decisions and long-term plans.
• Translate priorities into organized end-to-end development plans with budgets, resources, performance goals, and key checkpoints.
• Provide project team direction, facilitating effective communication, and ensuring timely delivery of multiple products simultaneously within scope and budget.
• Cultivate an environment of creativity and collaboration.
• Deliver quality learning experiences to students and instructors.
• Establish and maintain relationships with key authors and adoption decision makers to gain customer insights, strengthen adoptions, and identify new talent.
• Develop a deep understanding of competitors and an ability to anticipate competitor activity.
• Identify and test product ideas within segments, including the administration of focus groups, advisory boards, reviews, and customer meetings as appropriate.
• Regularly analyze product and portfolio plans to align forecasting and measurement of progress towards goals.
• Partner closely with Marketing and Sales teams to seed and secure adoptions.
• Work closely with colleagues in other functional areas on discipline-specific and pan-Cengage initiatives.
• Create compelling needs-based discipline, course, and product positioning and customer segments as inputs for campaign and sales enablement efforts.
• Make presentations at internal and external meetings, campus visits, and academic conventions in support of sales efforts and to drive sales.
• Share best practices across teams and functional groups.

Qualifications and Skills

• Creative and curious problem solving and collaboration
• Understanding of the educational technology and publishing industry
• Ability to clearly articulate vision and strategy and help team members understand how their work impacts business success
• Customer focus; understanding of how customer needs and challenges translate into opportunities
• Strong communication skills with the ability to facilitate team meetings, presentations, focus groups, and interviews
• BA or BS Degree
• Minimum 5 years in product management, product development, or other relevant portfolio management role
• Cross-functional team leadership experience
• Ability to inspire change through influence
• Self-discipline with a high degree of accountability
• Strong financial analysis and modeling skills and an understanding of business metrics
• Natural curiosity and willingness to learn with a desire for continuous improvement
• Strong written and verbal abilities enabling the preparation and presentation of information to a diverse and senior level audience
• Expected travel ~10% of time
• Proficiency with Word, Excel, and PowerPoint

Cengage is committed to working with broad talent pools to attract and hire strong and most qualified individuals. Our job applicants are considered regardless of any classification protected by applicable federal, state, provincial or local laws.

Cengage is also committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities during the job application process. If you are an applicant with a disability and require reasonable accommodation in the job application process, please contact us at [email protected].

About Cengage

Cengage, a global education technology company serving millions of learners, provides affordable, quality digital products and services that equip students with the skills and competencies needed to be job ready. We serve the higher education, workforce skills, secondary education, English language teaching and research markets worldwide. Through our scalable technology, including MindTap and Cengage Unlimited, we support all learners who seek to improve their lives and achieve their dreams through education.

Compensation

At Cengage Group, we take great pride in our commitment to providing a comprehensive and rewarding Total Rewards package. The full base pay range has been provided for this position. Individual base pay will vary based on schedule, qualifications, experience, internal equity, and geographic location. Sales roles may include incentive compensation beyond this base pay range. The base pay range for this position is $77,100.00 – $100,200.00 USD.