Chief Product & Technology Officer

Common Sense (commonsense.org) is the nation's leading children's advocacy organization dedicated to improving the lives of all kids and families by providing the trustworthy information, education, and independent voice they need to thrive in the 21st century.

Every day, millions of families turn to Common Sense for trusted advice and media and tech ratings. We offer the largest library of independent, age-based, and educational ratings and reviews for everything your kids want to watch, play, read, and learn. Through our schools program, we provide educators with a curriculum that teaches the essential digital literacy and citizenship skills every student needs to succeed. We also work with policymakers, industry leaders, and concerned parents, caregivers, and teachers to improve the media and education landscape for kids, families, and schools.

As a key member of our executive leadership team, the Chief Product & Technology Officer (CPTO) steers our technology and product vision, develops strategy, manages the budget and resource allotment, and leads the Engineering, Product, Data Ops, Privacy, and Member Services teams. As a key leader in the organization, the CPTO will enable our product and engineering teams to deliver a best-in-class product suite and tech platform tailored to our large global consumer and educator audience as well as meet the needs of our media and tech business partners.

TYPE: Full-time, 40 hours/week, permanent REPORTS TO: President LOCATION: San Francisco, CA SALARY: 200k +, depending on experience

Highlights

• Lead a dynamic team with a global footprint and work with an executive team based in the SF Bay Area, with offices in SF, NY, DC, LA, and London.
• Oversee a multiplatform strategy geared toward education and consumer markets and including web, mobile, and APIs that serve some of the leading media and tech companies.
• Set the vision and strategy for product and tech, aligned with the organization's business objectives for the leading children's media & tech advocacy organization.

WHAT YOU'LL DO:

Oversee the organization's technology platforms, products, and data strategies, while managing priorities, goals, and budget and resource allocation.

• Manage strategic vendor and technology partner relationships, with respective relevant platforms, and establish a technology process, oversight, and framework for ensuring that external work aligns with our internal standards and processes.
• Undertake cost-benefit analysis of product solutions and technologies that support them to advise the organization in making the best choices.
• Make infrastructure decisions, ensuring technical excellence, versatility, safety, resiliency, and scalability in architecting and engineering tech solutions that meet product solutions.
• Articulate build versus buy decisions; refine and lead the organization's product and technology outsourcing strategy.
• Support fundraising efforts and communication to Board, funders, and staff.
• Develop and manage annual engineering and product budgets.
• Oversee external data security, management, and governance.
• Watch industry developments and ensure that the organization's decision-makers are apprised of developments that may impact our ability to service constituencies and partners.
• Create and maintain a working environment that attracts and retains exceptional talent.
• Set up systems for ensuring our mission-critical platforms stay operational 24/7 and fulfill our SLAs.
• Maintain the product suite's relevance and competitiveness. Set the vision and strategy for technology and product, balancing the long-term and short-term needs of the organization.
• Present and define the organization's overall technology and product strategy to support business objectives and assess risks and opportunities as platforms and audiences grow.
• Lead the wider product and tech teams, and make decisions leveraging and balancing user research, data analysis, business need, market research, and competitive analysis.
• Work collaboratively with other department leads to ensure that product road maps, features, and capabilities match organizational needs and priorities in a thoughtful and defensible manner.
• Stay up to date on the latest AI and data science applications to ensure efficiency in our offerings and to support our privacy efforts, particularly around Natural Language Processing (NLP).
• Coach, lead, and mentor motivated Engineering, Product, UX, Data Ops, Member Services, and Privacy teams to deliver top-quality programs that are impactful and meaningful.
• Ensure tight collaboration across departments to drive strategic initiatives, including an understanding of the alignment between the product and technology strategy and various department road maps.

WHAT WE NEED TO SEE ON YOUR RESUME:

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, information systems, or related field (master's degree preferred) and/or at least 10 years of experience in building and managing technology and product platforms (websites, apps, etc.) for large or impactful clients.
• Deep understanding of the user experience and user-centered design, with a strong acuity for UI/UX.
• Proven motivational leader who can coach, communicate, delegate, support, and empower a team; experience integrating teams across multiple business units and managing a geographically dispersed workforce.
• Experience building purely technical products as well as products that function within an ecosystem (e.g. site/app/API/SSO systems).
• Ten to 15 years of broadening responsibility in product, technology, and engineering management as well as senior-level experience in the CTO, CPO, or a related senior function encompassing all areas of responsibility, preferably from a high-growth internet, nonprofit, or startup environment.
• Skills in strategic planning, goal setting, developing processes, problem-solving, and budgeting.
• Ability to convey technical topics in easy-to-understand business terms for senior staff colleagues, and work collaboratively with cross-functional teams and external partners.
• Strong background and understanding of technology and product development processes, agile development methodologies, and product lifecycle management.
• Drupal and LAMP stack experience a big plus.
• Ability to identify new opportunities, drive clarity, create focus, and make tough decisions in complex and dynamic contexts.
• Understanding of technology trends and the ability to align innovation with business goals. Broad knowledge of software engineering: languages, frameworks, techniques, and industry trends.
• Must be analytical, strategic, and extremely metrics-oriented.

WHAT WE OFFER:

• The opportunity to really make a difference in the lives of kids and families!
• An organization that offers work/life balance.
• Competitive health and welfare benefits, including medical, dental, vision and a matching 401(k).
• The chance to work with talented, passionate professionals.

Common Sense values the diversity of its employees and is an equal-opportunity employer. For more information on our values, please visit our statement on diversity, equity, and inclusion .

Common Sense will consider employment-qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records. However, job offers are made on the condition that the applicant subsequently passes a criminal background check. If the background check indicates a prior criminal conviction, we will conduct an individualized assessment to determine whether the conviction should result in denial of employment.