Want to make a real difference in education and have a blast doing it? There’s nothing more gratifying than providing a product that truly helps educators impact student learning. Our web-based educational achievement tool, used by K-12 educators throughout the U.S., is doing just that. It’s a game-changer for teachers and they love it! We’ve just completed the first phase of a major modernization of our product and we’re looking for a Technical Business Analyst/Project Manager, with strong analyst skills and a combination of education industry and technical knowledge, to take us through the second phase and beyond. Our small, rapidly growing edtech company is full of passionate, smart people who collaborate every day to empower educators to raise the level of student learning. Bring your enthusiasm and ideas and join our team to make an impact on student achievement.

The Technical Business Analyst/Project Manager will work closely with business leadership, educators on the Customer Support team, and the technical team to define and adjust development and delivery priorities for new feature development and production issues. You will help the team balance competing priorities among these areas. You’ll need to provide effective project, product, and backlog management, support story definition and estimation, and drive collaboration. The successful candidate will drive the project plan and manage activities from inception through delivery to ensure sustainable, predictable results.

In addition, the Technical Business Analyst/Project Manager will be the subject matter expert in our product(s) and know the features inside and out. You will understand issues students and educators experience with the current applications, as well as current topics and standards in the education technology space, which allows you to help the team envision and define features and product improvements.

Responsibilities

• Gather business and end user new features/enhancement requirements and articulate them to the development team for architectural and development planning
• Quickly take complex requirements from a range of stakeholders and distill them into a prioritized list of deliverable stories
• Plan and facilitate essential activities including backlog preparation and planning
• Facilitate the team’s efforts to create actionable user stories and acceptance criteria. Ensure that work requests are properly articulated, detailed, and prioritized in light of the overall product roadmap
• Identify and help remove impediments to blocked or stalled stories
• Administer the team’s Jira Cloud instance. Generate reports; set up or maintain custom workflows
• Provide relevant metrics and establish appropriate feedback loops to help the team improve its practices and predictability
• Plan and manage goals, schedules, dependencies, procedures and tasks

Basic Qualifications

• The ideal candidate will have a strong business analysis and project management background with a focus on technical projects and proven track record of delivering critical initiatives
• Mid- to Senior-level business analyst/project manager with 5+ years experience working with/in high-performing cross-functional teams on a variety of projects
• Curiosity, drive, and higher-order thinking skills. You will proactively seek out information and pursue details, and be able to shift focus between the big picture and the details with ease
• You will become and remain well-informed about matters in education and educational technology as they relate to Goldstar Learning’s markets and products. You will be able to understand and apply that information to the team’s work, helping the technical team to understand the domain and facilitating information flow between in-house educators and technologists
• Desire to take ownership, be creative with problem-solving and proactively secure the objectives of the business
• Ability to manage a varied workload successfully in a complex environment with rapidly changing priorities
• Exceptional communication skills – written, oral, visual, formal, informal. Speaks knowledgeably with members of both the business and development teams. Can exercise influence among members of a geographically distributed team
• Has strong technical, functional, and business process analysis skills with the ability to synthesize and clearly communicate findings
• Experience in an environment characterized by short iterations and frequent production deployments
• Basic understanding of AWS/cloud-hosted multi-tenant SaaS Web applications

Preferred Qualifications

• Education industry experience, particularly in one or more of the following:
  • Educational assessment
  • Primary and secondary education
  • Learning objectives/academic standards/competencies
  • Data and interoperability standards (or similar standards in other domains) such as IMS Global Learning Consortium®’s QTI®, OneRoster®, LTI®, or CASE®
• User Experience and/or usability understanding and/or design skills sufficient to make sound recommendations, envision features, and collaborate effectively with the team’s UX designer. Ability to apply usability heuristics. Ability to design and/or conduct “guerilla” usability activities
• Understanding of Agile development principles and practices

This position is full-time, on-site at our Chicago headquarters—steps away from public transportation in a fun, open loft concept environment in the River North neighborhood—just one block north of the Merchandise Mart’s 1871 tech hub.

Compensation and Benefits
We offer a competitive salary commensurate with experience. Our company benefits include medical, dental, life and disability insurance, generous paid vacation and 401K with matching and immediate vesting, health care and dependent care FSA, and commuter benefits.