Product Manager

About Primer

Primer is expanding a connected group of K–8 schools built around the enduring basics of American education. The company takes inspiration from the classic teaching primers that helped shape generations of readers, thinkers, and builders. Its schools emphasize close community, strong educators, and a culture that treats children as capable learners and leaders.

Primer’s first 200 years of students were shaped by primers. The next generation will be prepared by Primer.

Role Overview

Primer is hiring a Product Manager to help shape PrimerOS, the software, AI, and data foundation that supports how the organization runs.

Rather than selling technology to schools, Primer operates the schools itself. That includes opening campuses, recruiting educators, helping families, monitoring student progress, and enabling teachers to manage excellent classrooms every day.

As the company grows, the key challenge is to scale high-quality schools without increasing the operational team at the same rate. This role exists to turn the complicated, real-life work of schools into systems that make Primer more reliable, more scalable, and more human. The goal is to give teachers back time so they can spend more of it with students.

This position is based in the San Francisco office and involves close collaboration with product, engineering, operations, and academics teams, along with regular time in schools learning directly from teachers and how they work in practice.

What You’ll Do

You’ll tackle some of the most challenging and rewarding problems in education.

Your work will focus on translating the day-to-day reality of school operations into simple, valuable products. That may include tools that help teams track campus health, identify issues earlier, reduce administrative burden for educators, and support better decision-making across a growing network.

You will lead projects from discovery through launch. That means spending time with campus leaders, market teams, teachers, and central operators to identify where work slows down, then partnering with engineering to build solutions. You should expect to conduct on-campus time studies and look for even small pockets of time that technology can return to teachers.

In this role, you may be thinking through questions such as:

• How can Primer operate 10x more schools with only 2x the operational headcount?
• How can the company identify when a campus needs support before the problem becomes visible?
• How can AI cut repetitive work while still improving human judgment?
• How can school operations become lighter, clearer, and more consistent for the people doing the work?

As an early product leader on PrimerOS, you will help define how the team builds products, applies AI, and uses software to improve how the schools run.

What We’re Looking For

The ideal candidate brings at least 5 years of product management experience and has built products for complex, physical workflows.

You should have strong product judgment, feel comfortable working in messy real-world settings, and enjoy spending time with operators to observe how work truly happens and uncover hidden friction.

You’ll need to be analytical enough to interpret data, but practical enough to recognize when the answer is in the field rather than the dashboard.

Success in this role also requires end-to-end ownership, from discovery and strategy to specifications, launch, adoption, and ongoing iteration. Clear writing and structured thinking are important as well.

This role is designed for someone excited to work in person in San Francisco.

Something Extra

Primer welcomes candidates with varied backgrounds, including experience in education, healthcare, logistics, marketplaces, compliance, field operations, or other areas that involve understanding how complex human systems function.

Why This Role May Not Be a Fit

• If you are most comfortable with clean, software-only product work, this role may feel difficult because it centers on physical, messy operational workflows, campus visits, and direct observation of how teachers work.
• If you prefer joining an organization with established playbooks and mature product processes, this may not suit you because the role involves setting standards rather than following them.
• If you are not motivated by the mission, this likely will not be a good match. The work is tightly connected to teachers and children, and it requires genuine interest in how schools operate.
• If you prefer strategy over execution, this role may not fit. It requires full ownership of discovery, planning, launch, adoption, and iteration rather than handing off execution to others.

Mission and Work Culture

Primer describes itself as a mission-first company. The organization believes its mission is the highest-leverage way to create positive change. In support of that mission, the workplace stays focused on mission execution and does not center social or political activism unrelated to the company’s purpose.