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Director of Digital Product Management - Internal Tour Operations Platform
EF Educational ToursJob Description
About This Role
We’re modernizing the technology platform that powers how our group travel operations teams assemble and produce tours globally. Today, our Operations teams use a combination of a legacy platform, Salesforce, Power BI reports, sophisticated Excel spreadsheets, and AI assistants to bring together the many pieces that shape the traveler experience on tour. Our vision is to bring this capability and more into a unified platform that removes friction and unnecessary manual work, enabling Operations to focus on creating the best possible customer experience within our quality standards and budget.
The bulk of the replatforming work—moving off legacy and consolidating systems—spans the next 3-4 years, with full migration targeted by 2030. After that phase completes, your focus on modernization shifts to maturation and continuous capability development. This is a strategic platform role with staying power. Success means you've built something stable enough that your team can focus on evolving the product with the business and technology rather than managing migration risk.
The platform spans multiple critical Operations workflows, interconnected systems, and stakeholder groups across several business units. As the product leader for the platform, you hold the product frame and build the vision and direction in partnership with Operations leaders, frontline users, Engineering, UX, and other accountable stakeholders. Because this is an internal platform of significant scale and complexity, success depends on shared ownership with the leaders whose teams, processes, and outcomes are affected. You create the conditions for informed decisions and durable commitment by defining problems precisely, developing options, surfacing tradeoffs clearly, and making a strong product recommendation that stakeholders can evaluate and support. You bring a clear point of view and guide the right stakeholders toward a path forward.
This is a player-coach role. You won't just set direction— you'll roll up your sleeves on execution, balancing hands-on product work with building leverage through your team, peers, and business partners.
Core Responsibilities
Frame the problem precisely. Work directly with Operations teams to understand what the real friction is in their work versus what they've normalized. Leverage PM frameworks to define what we're solving, for whom, under what constraints—and articulate what a piece of work enables: Stronger decision-making? Fewer errors? Reduced manual work? Better customer experience? This clarity grounds engineering estimates, design decisions, success measures, and stakeholder expectations.
Navigate organizational risk. Modernization can sometimes challenge users’ expertise, informal workarounds they've built, and ways of working they understand. Read what's driving resistance: is it legitimate concern about transition difficulty or data loss, or are people resisting change because the current system works for them (even if inefficiently)? Articulate that clearly so the team can design a solution that transcends this resistance and the transformation lead can approach adoption thoughtfully.
Articulate and compel the vision. Help people see what is possible and build belief in the modernization path. Translate between technical implications, business impact, and operational reality so people at every level understand what they're working toward and why it's worth the short-term disruption. Build belief keeps us moving forward through setbacks.
Set the roadmap. Drive the investment sequencing across the different features within the platform. Ensure we have a healthy balance between near-term value delivery and moving off the legacy domain. Keep tradeoffs and sequencing decisions visible to cross-functional partners and senior stakeholders. Create conditions where all parties can move forward with shared ownership.
Unblock execution. Own the momentum. Stay two steps ahead of everyone else, surfacing dependencies and risks early. When the path forward is unclear, frame the decision, develop viable options, recommend a direction, and bring the right people together to resolve it.
Develop the team. Your core team is a junior PM, who you'll coach on execution and judgment, and a Success Manager/analyst who bridges frontline insights back to the roadmap. This is a lean, high-leverage structure—you're teaching two people to think at the level the work requires. You'll partner closely with the Director of Engineering, who is knowledgeable about the business, technically strong, and eager to collaborate. This is a genuine peer relationship, not a reporting dynamic. Together you will foster healthy ways of working and cross-discipline collaboration.
You Bring
PM fundamentals. You know how to empower your team to do the best work in execution, with clear problem statements grounded in the longer-term vision and strategy, complete acceptance criteria, relevant business context, and a prioritization that makes sense. You maintain alignment throughout delivery, keeping documentation current, decisions clear, and scope managed, ensuring implementation solves the problem and meets the target window of opportunity in the travel season.
True trio partnership. You've worked in a strong product trio where engineering and UX are strategic thought partners from the beginning, not just the executors of your solution. You're comfortable in ambiguity during discovery, willing to change your perspective when presented with compelling evidence and know how to get the most from your engineering and UX partnership at different points in the process.
Technical fluency. You need enough understanding of how systems work to be a useful partner during discovery and planning. You can follow technical conversations, ask clarifying questions when something isn't clear, and understand integration complexity well enough to recognize when scope has hidden dependencies. You learn your architecture quickly and use that understanding to frame problems clearly for engineering and translate technical constraints back to stakeholders.
Customer conviction. You never lose sight of the customer in pursuit of operational efficiency and effectiveness. You understand what matters in the customer journey and make sure that perspective is front and center in every problem framing and tradeoff discussion.
AI integration. You've integrated AI into your work—discovery, analysis, problem framing, documentation. You understand how AI changes workflows and you think about how your team can work better with it. You introduce quality checkpoints so AI output gets validated before it matters. You model good practice for how to use AI tools well.
“Multilingual” communication. You can translate between technical language (engineering), business language (senior stakeholders), and operator reality (frontline teams). You write clearly and speak persuasively. Your stories land because they're grounded in specific operator pain points, not rhetoric or engineering constructs.
Stakeholder credibility. You've built trust with cross-functional stakeholders by listening rather than imposing solutions, and by communicating with their context and goals in mind. You engage in difficult conversations directly, respectfully, and with curiosity. You hold a clear point of view while remaining open to being wrong, and you care about both the outcome and the relationship.
Cognitive flexibility. You have strong conviction but hold it loosely. You challenge "the way things are done" in a productive, collaborative way, and are inclined to generate multiple options to evaluate rather than anchoring on a single answer.
Drive and organization. You excel at creating the conditions for your team to move forward. You can multitask like a champion and flip to focus mode when needed. You’re two steps ahead of your team, using a sixth sense to remove roadblocks and proactively addressing risk.
Required Experience
About Us
Some companies are in the business of banking. Others are in the business of shoes. Or sports. Or soft drinks. At EF, we're in a different kind of business. One that's a little less tangible, and a lot more important. Because our business, what we make, makes everything else possible. We're in the business of understanding. Between people. Between cultures.
For over half a century we’ve been the leader in international educational programs and experiences designed to foster such understanding. Through language, cultural exchange, academic studies, and educational travel, we create the kinds of immersive experiences that challenge biases, open minds, and pave the way for a more understanding world.
You’ll find our offices and schools located in some of the world’s greatest cities, and filled with smart, driven people (over 50,000 of us) who push each other to be better every day. But it’s what we do together - building greater understanding, breaking down barriers, and creating a better world - that makes all the difference.
Founded in 1965 in Sweden, EF (Education First) is a global association of education companies that share a common mission of opening the world through education. EF has been recognized on Forbes 2025 and 2024 World’s Best Employers and 2024 Top Companies for Women lists, Fast Company’s 2025 Next Big Things In Tech, and was a 2024 App Store Award winner in Cultural Impact.
About The Team
EF Educational Tours teams up with educators to take students beyond the classroom on immersive international travel programs. We deliver educational experiences powered by a proven learning method that’s designed to build essential skills, like curiosity and communication. Our tours are where learning meets life—they give students firsthand experience of the world, and unlock the type of personal growth that prepares them for their futures.
Learn more about EF Educational Tours: https://www.eftours.com/
About This Role
We’re modernizing the technology platform that powers how our group travel operations teams assemble and produce tours globally. Today, our Operations teams use a combination of a legacy platform, Salesforce, Power BI reports, sophisticated Excel spreadsheets, and AI assistants to bring together the many pieces that shape the traveler experience on tour. Our vision is to bring this capability and more into a unified platform that removes friction and unnecessary manual work, enabling Operations to focus on creating the best possible customer experience within our quality standards and budget.
The bulk of the replatforming work—moving off legacy and consolidating systems—spans the next 3-4 years, with full migration targeted by 2030. After that phase completes, your focus on modernization shifts to maturation and continuous capability development. This is a strategic platform role with staying power. Success means you've built something stable enough that your team can focus on evolving the product with the business and technology rather than managing migration risk.
The platform spans multiple critical Operations workflows, interconnected systems, and stakeholder groups across several business units. As the product leader for the platform, you hold the product frame and build the vision and direction in partnership with Operations leaders, frontline users, Engineering, UX, and other accountable stakeholders. Because this is an internal platform of significant scale and complexity, success depends on shared ownership with the leaders whose teams, processes, and outcomes are affected. You create the conditions for informed decisions and durable commitment by defining problems precisely, developing options, surfacing tradeoffs clearly, and making a strong product recommendation that stakeholders can evaluate and support. You bring a clear point of view and guide the right stakeholders toward a path forward.
This is a player-coach role. You won't just set direction— you'll roll up your sleeves on execution, balancing hands-on product work with building leverage through your team, peers, and business partners.
Core Responsibilities
Frame the problem precisely. Work directly with Operations teams to understand what the real friction is in their work versus what they've normalized. Leverage PM frameworks to define what we're solving, for whom, under what constraints—and articulate what a piece of work enables: Stronger decision-making? Fewer errors? Reduced manual work? Better customer experience? This clarity grounds engineering estimates, design decisions, success measures, and stakeholder expectations.
Navigate organizational risk. Modernization can sometimes challenge users’ expertise, informal workarounds they've built, and ways of working they understand. Read what's driving resistance: is it legitimate concern about transition difficulty or data loss, or are people resisting change because the current system works for them (even if inefficiently)? Articulate that clearly so the team can design a solution that transcends this resistance and the transformation lead can approach adoption thoughtfully.
Articulate and compel the vision. Help people see what is possible and build belief in the modernization path. Translate between technical implications, business impact, and operational reality so people at every level understand what they're working toward and why it's worth the short-term disruption. Build belief keeps us moving forward through setbacks.
Set the roadmap. Drive the investment sequencing across the different features within the platform. Ensure we have a healthy balance between near-term value delivery and moving off the legacy domain. Keep tradeoffs and sequencing decisions visible to cross-functional partners and senior stakeholders. Create conditions where all parties can move forward with shared ownership.
Unblock execution. Own the momentum. Stay two steps ahead of everyone else, surfacing dependencies and risks early. When the path forward is unclear, frame the decision, develop viable options, recommend a direction, and bring the right people together to resolve it.
Develop the team. Your core team is a junior PM, who you'll coach on execution and judgment, and a Success Manager/analyst who bridges frontline insights back to the roadmap. This is a lean, high-leverage structure—you're teaching two people to think at the level the work requires. You'll partner closely with the Director of Engineering, who is knowledgeable about the business, technically strong, and eager to collaborate. This is a genuine peer relationship, not a reporting dynamic. Together you will foster healthy ways of working and cross-discipline collaboration.
You Bring
PM fundamentals. You know how to empower your team to do the best work in execution, with clear problem statements grounded in the longer-term vision and strategy, complete acceptance criteria, relevant business context, and a prioritization that makes sense. You maintain alignment throughout delivery, keeping documentation current, decisions clear, and scope managed, ensuring implementation solves the problem and meets the target window of opportunity in the travel season.
True trio partnership. You've worked in a strong product trio where engineering and UX are strategic thought partners from the beginning, not just the executors of your solution. You're comfortable in ambiguity during discovery, willing to change your perspective when presented with compelling evidence and know how to get the most from your engineering and UX partnership at different points in the process.
Technical fluency. You need enough understanding of how systems work to be a useful partner during discovery and planning. You can follow technical conversations, ask clarifying questions when something isn't clear, and understand integration complexity well enough to recognize when scope has hidden dependencies. You learn your architecture quickly and use that understanding to frame problems clearly for engineering and translate technical constraints back to stakeholders.
Customer conviction. You never lose sight of the customer in pursuit of operational efficiency and effectiveness. You understand what matters in the customer journey and make sure that perspective is front and center in every problem framing and tradeoff discussion.
AI integration. You've integrated AI into your work—discovery, analysis, problem framing, documentation. You understand how AI changes workflows and you think about how your team can work better with it. You introduce quality checkpoints so AI output gets validated before it matters. You model good practice for how to use AI tools well.
“Multilingual” communication. You can translate between technical language (engineering), business language (senior stakeholders), and operator reality (frontline teams). You write clearly and speak persuasively. Your stories land because they're grounded in specific operator pain points, not rhetoric or engineering constructs.
Stakeholder credibility. You've built trust with cross-functional stakeholders by listening rather than imposing solutions, and by communicating with their context and goals in mind. You engage in difficult conversations directly, respectfully, and with curiosity. You hold a clear point of view while remaining open to being wrong, and you care about both the outcome and the relationship.
Cognitive flexibility. You have strong conviction but hold it loosely. You challenge "the way things are done" in a productive, collaborative way, and are inclined to generate multiple options to evaluate rather than anchoring on a single answer.
Drive and organization. You excel at creating the conditions for your team to move forward. You can multitask like a champion and flip to focus mode when needed. You’re two steps ahead of your team, using a sixth sense to remove roadblocks and proactively addressing risk.
Required Experience
- 7+ years in product management, working as part of a product trio (Eng/PM/UX) in iterative/Agile delivery environments
- Experience with internal platforms, B2B software, or digital transformation
- Demonstrated ability to manage complexity—handling scope across multiple interconnected projects, systems, technical domains, or workflows
- Track record working in cross-functional, enterprise environments; ability to frame tradeoffs across competing priorities and facilitate alignment
- Interest in process, workflow, or service design
- Experience managing or developing other product manage
- Travel industry, manufacturing, or fulfillment domain experience
- Experience with legacy system modernization or platform rebuilds
- Familiarity with domain-driven design or systems thinking approaches
- Experience building AI features
- Experience working across distributed teams
- Project management fundamentals
- Workshop design and/or facilitation experience
- Change management fundamentals and/or management consulting experience
- Operator priorities and workflows are understood well enough to design systems that reflect how work should actually happen. As a result, operations staff actively adopt new features and functionality because they genuinely make their work better, easier, and more interesting.
- Modernization decisions are framed clearly enough that stakeholders can commit to sequencing and tradeoff choices without relitigating them. As a result, stakeholders feel a shared ownership of what was built and why.
- The team develops stronger judgment about balancing modernization with speed to impact and collaborates more fluidly across disciplines and domains. As a result, velocity increases and the team spends more time working in collective flow.
- Overall awareness of what we’re working on and why goes up, fueling belief and cross-functional collaboration. As a result, the organization stays deeply committed to the modernization journey.
- A fun, international, and dynamic environment
- Regular training sessions and opportunities for company growth
- Opportunity for business-related travel and participation in the Educational Tours Staff Experience Travel Program (STEP) where you will be eligible to participate in company-led experiences around the world. Please inquire during your interviews to learn more!
- Team events, kick-offs, and Holiday Parties
- Discounts on EF programs for Staff and Staff Families for all EF Programs
- Free use of EF Hello: a premium Language Learning App
- Hybrid policy coming onsite to our office four days with the option to work from home one day per week
- Tuition Reimbursement for continued education
- And much more…
About Us
Some companies are in the business of banking. Others are in the business of shoes. Or sports. Or soft drinks. At EF, we're in a different kind of business. One that's a little less tangible, and a lot more important. Because our business, what we make, makes everything else possible. We're in the business of understanding. Between people. Between cultures.
For over half a century we’ve been the leader in international educational programs and experiences designed to foster such understanding. Through language, cultural exchange, academic studies, and educational travel, we create the kinds of immersive experiences that challenge biases, open minds, and pave the way for a more understanding world.
You’ll find our offices and schools located in some of the world’s greatest cities, and filled with smart, driven people (over 50,000 of us) who push each other to be better every day. But it’s what we do together - building greater understanding, breaking down barriers, and creating a better world - that makes all the difference.
Founded in 1965 in Sweden, EF (Education First) is a global association of education companies that share a common mission of opening the world through education. EF has been recognized on Forbes 2025 and 2024 World’s Best Employers and 2024 Top Companies for Women lists, Fast Company’s 2025 Next Big Things In Tech, and was a 2024 App Store Award winner in Cultural Impact.
About The Team
EF Educational Tours teams up with educators to take students beyond the classroom on immersive international travel programs. We deliver educational experiences powered by a proven learning method that’s designed to build essential skills, like curiosity and communication. Our tours are where learning meets life—they give students firsthand experience of the world, and unlock the type of personal growth that prepares them for their futures.
Learn more about EF Educational Tours: https://www.eftours.com/