Product Owner, Academic Operations

About the Role

We’re looking for a Product Owner – Academic Operations to drive the vision, prioritization, and delivery of Kuali’s academic operations solutions. 
As Product Owner, you’ll translate institutional needs into actionable product requirements, ensuring our software empowers universities to streamline curriculum, scheduling, and academic workflows.

You’ll collaborate closely with Product Managers, Designers, and Engineers to deliver high-impact features that improve operational efficiency and student outcomes

Who are we? 

Kuali builds software solutions for higher education. We help our customers — colleges & universities — focus on providing a fantastic education to students by decreasing their administrative costs. We work in a competitive space, ripe for innovation, with users ready to be delighted.

Our Culture
As a company, we are guided by our cultural values:

• Iterate to evolve
• Cultivate openness
• Act with accountability
• Assume the best
• Practice humility
• Deliver amazing experiences

At Kuali, we learn from and teach each other, we practice transparency and empathy, we delight in delivering value to our customers, and we WIN!

We work remotely and have for years. Distributed work is in our bones, with a history of institutions working across state lines on open-source software for more than ten years. Our employees each work in the environment where they’re happiest, from Pennsylvania to Seattle. We work consciously to create a collaborative and healthy remote work culture, and we travel to meet in person a few times each year. 

Everyone should love their work.

At Kuali, we embrace diversity and inclusion at every level. We value and respect individuals from all backgrounds, recognizing that a rich tapestry of experiences and perspectives fuels our success as a company and enriches our collective human experience.

What you’ll be responsible for

• Own the product backlog for Kuali Research, ensuring clarity, prioritization, and alignment with strategic goals.
• Translate customer feedback, institutional requirements, and product vision into actionable user stories and acceptance criteria.
• Collaborate daily with engineering and design teams to ensure timely, high‑quality delivery.
• Partner with Product Managers to refine roadmap priorities and validate outcomes against customer needs.
• Support release planning, sprint reviews, and retrospectives to drive continuous improvement.
• Serve as the voice of the customer within the scrum team, ensuring solutions meet real‑world research administration challenges.
• Monitor product performance and collaborate on data‑driven decisions to enhance usability and adoption.

Ideal candidates have experience with:

• Own, prioritize, and continuously refine the Academic Operations product backlog, ensuring alignment with product strategy, customer needs, supporting evidence, technical dependencies, and team capacity.
• Own specific roadmap initiatives - leading solution discovery and collaborating with engineering on delivery.
• Collaborate with Product Managers to translate the product vision, strategy, roadmap priorities, and desired outcomes into achievable product increments.
• Develop a strong understanding of Academic Operations users, institutional workflows, requirements, and higher education practices.
• Translate customer feedback, user research, product data, and institutional requirements into clear user stories, acceptance criteria, and measurable outcomes.
• Ensure backlog items are appropriately defined, prioritized, and ready for development.
• Represent customer and user needs throughout the development process, answering questions and making timely scope and priority decisions.
• Partner with Engineering and Design to develop intuitive, accessible, secure, scalable, and configurable solutions.
• Manage tradeoffs among customer value, scope, quality, timing, technical constraints, and long-term product health.
• Validate completed work through acceptance testing, stakeholder feedback, user research, and product data.
• Lead product release-readiness activities, including documentation, internal enablement, implementation considerations, acceptance criteria validation, and stakeholder communication.
• Partner with Sales, Marketing,  Customer Success, Implementation, Support, and other customer-facing teams to ensure successful product launches and adoption.
• Monitor adoption, usability, quality, and operational performance following release and translate findings into backlog improvements.
• Triage product defects and customer-reported issues, balancing urgent customer needs with roadmap priorities, planned investments, and technical debt.
• Communicate product progress, decisions, dependencies, risks, and outcomes clearly to internal and external stakeholders.
• Use AI to improve the quality, speed, and throughput of backlog management, requirements development, analysis, and product delivery.
• Contribute to the continuous improvement of Kuali’s product development practices, standards, and AI-powered product operating system.

We’d be delighted if you bring experience with:

• 5+ years of experience in product ownership or business analysis within SaaS or enterprise software.
• Strong understanding of higher education operations—curriculum, scheduling, or student systems.
• Skilled in agile methodologies and backlog management.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder engagement skills.
• Analytical mindset with a focus on outcomes and user experience.
• Passion for improving education through technology.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with academic ERP or SIS integrations.
• Familiarity with product analytics and data-driven decision-making.
• Background in higher education administration or edtech product development.
• A collaborative, curious, and mission-driven mindset.

Perks

• Remote-first work
• Top-of-the-line equipment of your choice to get your job done
• A truly exceptional benefits package including full premium coverage for employee and dependent medical and dental care
• 401(k) matching
• Employee stock option plan
• Paid Maternity/Parental leave
• All the paid time off you need (just work it out with your manager)
• Encouragement and support in learning and improving your skill-sets.
• Employee resource groups and community events