Staff/Principal Product Lead (ACF)

<h2><span style="font-weight: 400;"></span></h2> <h2><span style="font-weight: 400;">About Skylight</span></h2> <p>Skylight is a digital consultancy using design and technology to help government agencies deliver better public services.&nbsp;</p> <p>We’re at the forefront of a civic movement to reinvent how all levels of government serve families, patients, and many others in today's digital world.</p> <p>If you want to play a part in driving this critical movement forward, we’d love for you to join our growing team of public interest technologists.&nbsp;</p> <p>The work we do matters.</p> <h2><span style="font-weight: 400;">About the job</span></h2> <p>At Skylight, product leads help shape what we build and why — guiding the vision and direction for software that improves government services for the public. This work is focused on meeting the needs of young adults transitioning out of the foster care system.</p> <p>Skylight is partnering with the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) to build&nbsp;<span><a href="https://fosteringthefuture.gov/" target="_blank">Fostering the Future</a></span>, a platform that helps young adults aging out of foster care find the resources they need, when they need them. Co-designed with former foster youth and launching in fall 2026, the platform pairs a curated resource database with AI to help young adults in foster care ask the questions they don't know to ask and access the resources they don't know exist.</p> <p>As product strategy lead, you'll guide the product vision and roadmap. You'll help the team set priorities against user needs and program goals, translate research with foster youth into clear product direction, and shape what a genuinely useful, safe, and trustworthy experience looks like for this population. Working closely with researchers, designers, and engineers, you'll help the team navigate what the platform should do, how it should grow, and how we know whether it's working. The platform uses AI and a curated knowledge base to deliver its value, so you'll want enough fluency in how these products behave to help set strategy that's both realistic and ambitious — but your focus is the product and its users, not the implementation.</p> <p></p> <h2></h2> <h3><span style="font-weight: 400;">What to know going in</span></h3> <p></p> <p>You'll join a small cross-functional team of researchers, designers, engineers, and product managers helping the roughly 20,000 young people who age out of foster care each year get the support they're entitled to. This is a fast-moving, zero-to-one effort — a new public-facing federal platform at national scale, where much of the strategy is still being written. You'll be a central voice in shaping it.</p> <h2><span style="font-weight: 400;">What you’ll do</span></h2> <h2><span style="font-weight: 400;"></span></h2> <ul> <li>Lead a cross-functional team of researchers, designers, engineers, and subject matter experts to build and ship high-impact products and services</li> <li>Translate needs from users and government partners into a product strategy, including vision, objectives, measures of success, product roadmap, and product backlog</li> <li>Manage the direction, scope, and priorities of the product initiative, building from user research to minimum viable products to scalable solutions</li> <li>Write user stories, prioritize stories, and build release plans</li> <li>Facilitate team ceremonies such as planning meetings, stakeholder syncs, and retrospectives</li> <li>Draw on data and feedback to inform the product strategy and roadmap</li> <li>Work in close partnership with government teams to transfer digital skills and product knowledge throughout the course of the project</li> <li>Creatively navigate bureaucratic challenges, paving the way for more intuitive processes in the future</li> <li>Collaborate with government partners to ensure compatibility with existing processes and technologies</li> </ul> <h2><span style="font-weight: 400;">What we're looking for</span></h2> <h3><span style="font-weight: 400;">Minimum qualifications</span></h3> <ul> <li>Has demonstrated experience leading product development from concept through launch for net-new digital tools, navigating ambiguity, defining scope, and building alignment across cross-functional stakeholders in resource-constrained environments</li> <li>Experience with participatory research processes that centered people with lived experience as active collaborators in product definition, ensuring solutions reflected the real needs and priorities of the communities served</li> <li>Understand lean product principles and how to apply them (e.g., minimum viable product) at various stages of the product life cycle in order to mitigate risk, validate assumptions, and amplify learning</li> <li>Can develop a product strategy that is informed by an understanding of the problem to be solved, prioritizes outcomes over feature sets, and establishes the direction of the product over time (e.g., product roadmap), including success criteria</li> <li>Ability to execute the product strategy by breaking down the product’s scope into usable chunks of value that can be realized sooner rather than later, creating and maintaining a prioritized backlog with validated user stories, and facilitating team ceremonies over the course of the product’s iterations</li> <li>Understand how to engage in the process of human-centered design in order to better inform product direction</li> <li>Ability to collaborate with folks outside of your discipline, such as researchers, designers, engineers, and others, in order to get things done</li> <li>Ability to manage clients and stakeholders in a way that builds trust, alignment, and healthy environments for individuals and teams</li> <li>Understand the merits of different software development methodologies (e.g., agile, lean) and how to put them into practice</li> <li>Commitment to equipping federal teams with documentation, training, and mentoring so improvements last beyond the contract</li> <li>Ability to work effectively in a professional services environment</li> <li>Passion for improving public outcomes through great government services</li> <li>A mindset and work approach that align with Skylight’s <a href="https://skylight.digital/company/values/">core values</a></li> </ul> <h3><span style="font-weight: 400;">Nice-to-have qualifications</span></h3> <ul> <li>Background in driving user adoption and enablement, including training, change management, or service design</li> <li>Demonstrated ability to support large, distributed, or operational user populations</li> <li>Hands-on involvement with UAT, usability testing, or readiness assessments</li> <li>Experience working with Palantir’s Foundry platform.</li> <li>Prior experience working in the civic tech space</li> <li>Experience working in a remote-team environment</li> </ul> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;"><em>Don’t meet every qualification but think you can do the job? We’d still love to hear from you. If you’re excited about the role, apply. We consider candidates with a range of backgrounds and experiences.</em></span></p> <h2><span style="font-weight: 400;">Other requirements</span></h2> <ul> <li>All work must be conducted within the U.S., excluding U.S. territories. Some federal contracts require U.S. citizenship to be eligible for employment.</li> <li>You must be legally authorized to work in the U.S. now and in the future without sponsorship.</li> <li>As a government contractor, you may be required to obtain a public trust or security clearance.</li> <li>You may be required to complete a company background check successfully.</li> <li>Some of our available roles are on federal contracts that require a degree or additional years of experience as a substitute.</li> </ul> <h3><span style="font-weight: 400;">Location</span></h3> <p>This is a fully remote position.</p> <h3><span style="font-weight: 400;">Travel</span></h3> <p>This role may require occasional or regular travel based on company, client, or contract needs.</p> <h2><span style="font-weight: 400;">Care package</span></h2> <h3><span style="font-weight: 400;">Salary</span></h3> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">We want to give you the most competitive salary possible. After all, you deserve it! To that end, we use the results of our interview process to determine what salary is most appropriate given your current level of seniority. For a Product Manager at Skylight, the current salary ranges are as follows:</span></p> <ul> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Associate Product Manager: $90,000–$125,000</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Product Manager I: $120,000–$140,000</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Product Manager II: $135,000–$160,000</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Senior Product Manager: $150,000–$185,000</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Staff Product Manager: $170,000–$203,000</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Principal Product Manager:&nbsp; $180,000–$230,000</span></li> </ul> <h3><span style="font-weight: 400;">Benefits</span></h3> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Your well-being is important to us, so we focus on supporting you in a variety of ways:</span></p> <ul> <li>Medical insurance, dental insurance, vision insurance</li> <li>Short-term and long-term disability insurance</li> <li>Life and AD&amp;D insurance</li> <li>Dependent care FSA, healthcare FSA, health savings account</li> <li>Dollar-for-dollar 401(k) match up to 10% of your salary with no vesting period</li> <li>Flexible paid-time-off policy (generally around 25 days per year), plus 11 paid federal holidays</li> <li>Up to 12 weeks paid-time-off for all eligible new birth, adoption, or foster parents</li> <li>Performance rewards, including annual salary increase, annual performance bonus, spot bonuses, and stock options</li> <li>Business development / sales bonuses</li> <li>Referral bonuses</li> <li>Annual $2,000 allowance for professional development</li> <li>Annual $750 allowance for tech-related purchases</li> <li>Annual swag budget of $100 to display your Skylight pride with some merchandise (hoodies, hats, and more)</li> <li>Dollar-for-dollar charity donation matching, up to $500 per year</li> <li>Flexible, remote-friendly work environment</li> <li>An environment that empowers you to unleash your superpowers for public good</li> </ul> <h2><span style="font-weight: 400;">Interview tips</span></h2> <ul> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Visit our </span><a href="https://skylight.digital/careers/join/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">join page</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> to learn more about how our interview process works.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Check out our </span><a href="https://skylight.digital/careers/career-pathways/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Career Pathways framework</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> to learn more about the different roles within Skylight and the skills needed to do them.</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">If you’d like to request reasonable accommodations during the application or interviewing process, please contact our recruiting team at </span><a href="mailto:recruiting@skylight.digital"><span style="font-weight: 400;">recruiting@skylight.digital</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></li> </ul> <p><em>We participate in E-Verify and upon hire, will provide the federal government with your Form I-9 information to confirm that you’re authorized to work in the U.S.</em></p> <p><em>We are an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, national origin, sex, religion, age, disability, veteran status, or any other category protected by applicable law.</em></p>