Head of Product - Community Platform

About the Role: We're building a global game-making community where learners move from player to creator to contributor to career. You'll build and evolve the platform to serve a wide ecosystem of companies, college partners, game studios, and credential issuers like ASU. As VP of Product, Community Platform, you will own the platform thesis and roadmap, design contribution loops that drive participation and belonging, and translate cross-ecosystem needs into capabilities like credential graphs, APIs, and learning orchestration. Your role is to synthesize these diverse needs into coherent platform strategy and prioritize ruthlessly across stakeholders. Our ideal candidate is a highly experienced individual contributor and proven leader. This role is focused on platform strategy, product craft, and cross-functional influence rather than building a product management team. You'll drive impact through your expertise, stakeholder partnerships, and product leadership rather than through direct reports. You will operate across regions, pilot and scale playbooks, and communicate a clear narrative that aligns universities, studios, funders, and learners. We need you to prioritize ruthlessly, ship quickly, and measure what matters: activation, retention, contribution, and real skill proof that opens pathways to work. Key Responsibilities: Own the platform thesis & roadmap to enable a multi-stakeholder ecosystem (learners, studios, colleges, credential issuers, employers), from current programs to scalable network effects. Align with the Learning Experience vision to seamlessly deliver our always-on learning program, advancing user and business needs together. Understand and design community platform systems : You know how successful community platforms work - the loops, incentives, and features (reputation, portfolios, credentials, pathways) that drive participation, contribution, and belonging at scale. You've built these systems, not just theorized about them. Prioritize ruthlessly across stakeholders; say “no / not now” while keeping trust high. Drive web-product velocity : discovery, rapid iteration, experiments, and metrics (activation, retention, contribution). Move from 'prove it once' to 'scale 100x' with data-driven practices. Translate ecosystem needs into platform capabilities (APIs, credential graph, learning orchestration, multi-tenant considerations) with strong technical fluency. Our platform must enable learners to build reputation and demonstrate skills through portfolios, GitHub contributions, and recognized credentials - opening pathways to internships and apprenticeships with game studios and tech employers. Practice participatory design : Engage learners, educators, and community members directly in product development through rapid prototyping, user research, and feedback loops. You understand that the best product decisions come from observing real usage patterns, not org chart priorities. Design for organic growth: Build features that naturally encourage learners to invite peers, share projects, and expand the community through authentic participation rather than growth hacks. Tell the story : crisp narratives that align studios, universities, funders, and learners on what we’re building and why it matters. What You Bring: 10+ years in product management and deep community platform experience with platforms like Discord, Roblox, GitHub, Twitch, YouTube, or Reddit - you understand how to build the features and systems that make online communities thrive at scale. Ecosystem builder with a track record taking a product from single use case to multi-party platform/marketplace at meaningful scale. Strategic product leadership : Operates at the intersection of business strategy and product execution - defining problems the organization should solve, not just how to solve assigned problems. Comfortable zooming from long-term platform vision to immediate execution decisions. AI-fluent : sees AI as a participation and agency amplifier (not just automation). Open source fluency: Understanding of how open source communities develop software and the cultural practices that make them work - contributions, governance, transparency, community-driven development. Technical depth (non-coding) : comfortable steering platform architecture trade-offs, integrations, credentials/assessment, and trust frameworks. Design literacy in games/UX and motivational systems that make learning feel like belonging. Cross-cultural operator comfortable as part of a distributed, 24/7 team and competent communication across time zones. Systems thinker able to strategize and deliver across multi-stakeholder platforms where partners have competing needs.