Product Manager, HRS Grants

Huron is a consulting company that helps clients drive growth and enhance performance in education organizations. The Product Manager for HRS Grants will be responsible for shaping the next generation of Huron Research Suite grants capabilities, focusing on product strategy, market understanding, and cross-functional alignment.

Responsibilities:

• Define and communicate the product vision for HRS Grants, including a multi-year view of the product, market, customer needs, and business opportunities
• Translate Huron's research administration point of view, industry standards, market trends, and customer problems into strategic product themes, outcomes, and roadmap priorities
• Identify growth opportunities and determine the investment, organizational readiness, and cross-functional support required to achieve target business outcomes
• Position of HRS Grants based on the market problems it solves, the value it creates, and Huron's strengths and differentiation
• Lead customer discovery with clients, prospects, advisory groups, implementation teams, support teams, and internal stakeholders to understand unmet needs and buy drivers
• Identify and prioritize personas and use cases across research administrators, investigators, departmental users, central office teams, compliance stakeholders, and institutional leadership
• Track market trends, regulatory and operational changes, competitor capabilities, alternative solutions, and emerging customer expectations that may affect HRS Grants
• Use win/loss insights to understand why prospects buy or do not buy, how customers evaluate solutions, and where HRS Grants can strengthen differentiation
• Assess and leverage Huron assets, including product capabilities, research administration expertise, implementation of knowledge, consulting services, data assets, and partner relationships
• Build and maintain an outcome-driven roadmap that provides a clear path to the HRS Grants product vision and business objectives
• Validate product opportunities and develop initiative business cases that define target outcomes, customer value, investment needs, dependencies, risks, and success measures
• Develop epics, features, and high-level product requirements that communicate what capabilities are needed and why they matter to customers and the business
• Prioritize roadmap investments across growth, retention, customer adoption, implementation efficiency, migration needs, modernization, technical health, and margin considerations
• Partner with UX, architecture, engineering, QA, implementation, support, and customer-facing teams to ensure delivery planning remains aligned with product strategy and expected outcomes
• Support the transition from legacy research administration solutions to an integrated cloud-based Huron Research Suite product through capability rationalization, workflow alignment, migration planning, and adoption strategy
• Serve as a product leader for grants-related capabilities across the sponsored research lifecycle, including proposal development, institutional routing and approvals, award negotiation, award setup, grants management, compliance workflows, and related research administration processes
• Develop a deep understanding of how HRS Grants supports institutional research operations and how grants capabilities interact with other Huron Research Suite modules and shared services
• Engage senior client advisors, development partners, and customer community members to validate product strategy, roadmap direction, workflow design, and market fit
• Identify opportunities to reduce administrative burden, improve workflow efficiency, strengthen compliance support, improve usability, and increase customer adoption
• Represent customer and user needs in strategic product discussions while balancing business value, technical feasibility, implementation impact, and long-term platform direction
• Partner with architects, engineering leaders, QA, DevOps/SRE, and application teams to ensure product decisions are technically sound, scalable, reliable, secure, maintainable, and aligned with Huron's long-term platform strategy
• Bring working knowledge of modern SaaS products, cloud-based delivery, modular architectures or microservices, APIs, integrations, data flows, identity and access management, configuration, feature management, reporting, auditability, and enterprise security expectations
• Evaluate product and technical tradeoffs related to performance, scalability, resiliency, observability, operational readiness, implementation complexity, cost of goods sold, FinOps impacts, backward compatibility, and time to market
• Ensure product requirements include appropriate non-functional considerations, such as performance, usability, configurability, reliability, security, extensibility, maintainability, auditability, and compliance needs
• Understand technical dependencies across Huron Research Suite modules and shared services to help sequence roadmap work in a way that supports predictable delivery and customer value
• Balance new capabilities with platform modernization, technical debt reduction, reliability improvements, legacy transition needs, and customer-facing commitments
• Manage proactive product communications with relevant stakeholders from strategy through execution, including product leadership, engineering, consulting, sales, implementation, support, customer success, user education, and senior leaders
• Serve as a customer-facing product representative in roadmap reviews, client interviews, advisory discussions, beta programs, customer community meetings, conference working sessions, and industry events
• Partner with sales, marketing, consulting, implementation, support, and customer success teams to support market positioning, sales enablement, implementation readiness, customer adoption, and retention
• Collaborate with Huron consulting leadership to identify ways HRS Grants can support services growth, differentiation, client value, and long-term customer success
• Track product and portfolio performance, communicate strategy cross-functionally, and identify and escalate risks related to market alignment, customer commitments, technical dependencies, adoption, scope, cost, or timing
• Support strengthening the HRS Grants product business by understanding growth objectives, revenue opportunities, sales pipeline, customer retention, product margins, cost drivers, and COGS considerations
• Define, monitor, and communicate a balanced set of product KPIs, including objective attainment, customer adoption, usage, retention, CSAT, NPS, implementation efficiency, operational health, and release outcomes
• Use product performance data, customer feedback, support trends, implementation lessons, and production insights to inform roadmap decisions and continuous product improvement
• Partner with product leadership, finance, sales, and consulting stakeholders to understand pipeline, sales forecasts, revenue forecasts, product investment needs, and go-to-market changes
• Identify risks to product adoption, customer value, competitive differentiation, revenue growth, margin, reliability, or scalability, and work cross-functionally to develop mitigation plans

Requirements:

• U.S. work authorization is required
• Bachelor's degree or equivalent work experience in research administration, science, business administration, computer science, management information systems, industrial engineering, mathematics, or another analytical, business, scientific, or technology-related field
• Direct experience working in research administration, sponsored research, grants management, research operations, research compliance, or research administration software
• Strong working knowledge of grants-related workflows such as proposal development, institutional approvals, award negotiation, award setup, sponsored projects administration, or related operational processes
• Experience working at or with research-intensive institutions, such as hospitals, universities, cancer centers, academic medical centers, or research organizations
• Experience in Product Management, Technical Product Management, Product Strategy, Business Analysis, research administration consulting, software implementation, or a similar role supporting enterprise software
• Proven ability to identify customer and market problems, define product opportunities, build business cases, establish roadmap priorities, and communicate product direction
• Ability to develop epics, features, and high-level product requirements that connect customer value, business outcomes, and technical feasibility
• Demonstrated ability to influence cross-functional teams and align stakeholders around priorities, decisions, tradeoffs, and product outcomes
• Familiarity with software development lifecycle concepts and Agile development practices
• Working understanding of modern SaaS products, cloud-based software delivery, enterprise application architecture, integrations, APIs, data flows, identity and access management, security, scalability, reliability, and operational readiness
• Ability to read, understand, and discuss architectural diagrams, technical designs, integration approaches, data models, and non-functional requirements at a product leadership level
• Ability to communicate technical concepts, tradeoffs, and risks clearly to non-technical stakeholders and business concepts to technical stakeholders
• Comfort making product tradeoff recommendations that consider customer value, technical complexity, implementation impact, operational readiness, COGS, and long-term maintainability
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills with the ability to present clearly to customers, internal teams, executives, advisory groups, and cross-functional stakeholders
• Strong facilitation, analytical thinking, and decision-making skills across both technical and non-technical topics
• Demonstrated empathy for users and passion for delivering high-quality solutions that solve meaningful customer problems
• Ability to work independently, manage competing priorities, adapt quickly, and drive clarity in complex or ambiguous situations
• Ability to collaborate effectively across multiple time zones and with distributed teams, including teams in the U.S. and India
• 5+ years of experience as a Product Manager, Senior Product Manager, Technical Product Manager, Product Strategist, or similar enterprise software product role
• Experience with Huron Research Suite, Huron Click, InfoEd, Cayuse, COEUS, or similar research administration solutions
• Experience supporting grants management, proposal development, sponsored projects, award negotiation, or related research administration products
• Experience with cloud-based SaaS products, multi-tenant platforms, enterprise software modernization, platform migration, or legacy-to-cloud product transitions
• Familiarity with microservices or modular monoliths, REST or GraphQL APIs, event-driven systems, CI/CD practices, DevOps/SRE concepts, observability, FinOps, technical debt management, and security or compliance frameworks such as SOC 2, ISO, or GDPR
• Experience presenting to customer advisory boards, executive stakeholders, user groups, product community meetings, national research administration conferences, or industry events
• Experience supporting go-to-market strategy, win/loss analysis, sales enablement, competitive positioning, product packaging, pricing inputs, or product P&L discussions
• Proficiency with product-oriented tooling, road mapping, execution and collaboration (Azure DevOps, Aha!, Lucid, Jira, Figma, ...)