Group Product Manager, NextGen

Location: Remote

Nelnet Business Services (NBS), a division of Nelnet, Inc., provides payment technology and education services to more than 1,200 higher education institutions, nearly 12,000 K-12 schools, and millions of individual students, families, and supporters across the globe. Our culture of service enables us to form long-lasting and trusted partnerships, while our focus on creativity and innovative solutions empowers our customer communities to thrive.

Next Gen Web Solutions (NextGen), a Nelnet company, builds the software that keeps some of higher education’s most essential administrative work moving—scholarships, financial aid verification, digital forms, and student employment. For more than 18 years, NextGen has partnered with colleges, universities, and foundations to bring accuracy, compliance, speed, and security to those processes, and today our solutions serve more than 600 institutions and over 20 million students.

We are now investing in a dedicated product team to lead the next chapter of the NextGen portfolio, and we are seeking an experienced, hands-on product leader to help build it—someone who will guide a small team of Product Managers while staying close enough to the work to ship alongside them.

The Group Product Manager is a player-coach role. You will personally own one or more NextGen solutions—running discovery, writing requirements, and shipping with your engineering and design partners—while leading and growing the Product Managers who own the rest of the portfolio. You will shape a cohesive strategy across NextGen’s solutions, keep the team aligned across engineering, design, sales, implementation, and client support, and make sure every release lands with real impact for the campus administrators, employers, students, and families our institutions serve. Reporting into senior product leadership, you will set the bar for product craft at NextGen.

JOB RESPONSIBILITIES

Hands-On Product Ownership

Personally own one or more NextGen solutions end to end—running discovery, writing requirements, making the prioritization calls, and partnering daily with engineering and design to ship.

Stay close to the details: dig into the data, prototype and pressure-test ideas, review designs, and validate solutions with the financial aid, student employment, and campus administrators who rely on our products every day.

Set the bar for product craft by example, modeling the discovery, writing, and decision-making you expect from the PMs you lead.

Team Leadership & Development

Lead, mentor, and grow a small team of Product Managers, setting clear expectations, helping each PM sharpen their craft, and helping recruit the talent that will join the team as it expands.

Foster a high-agency, outcome-oriented culture—and the lightweight product practices to support it—where PMs operate with confidence in ambiguity and hold themselves accountable to measurable business results.

Balance hands-on coaching with real autonomy—giving your PMs ownership of their areas while stepping in directly when a problem needs your attention.

Product Strategy & Execution

Own the product vision, strategy, and roadmap across the NextGen portfolio, translating business goals into a sequenced plan that delivers value to institutions and the students they serve.

Identify opportunities to connect the portfolio—shared workflows, integrations, and data—so that NextGen solutions deliver more value together than they do on their own.

Identify and build practical applications of AI across the portfolio, pushing for experiences that eliminate manual work for campus staff and simplify the journey for students, rather than ones that are only incrementally better.

Keep a close eye on the higher education landscape—federal financial aid and student employment policy, competitive moves, and shifting institutional needs—and fold what you learn back into the roadmap.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

Partner with sales, marketing, implementation, and client support to plan and execute launches, making sure each release is market-ready, lands commercially, and is easy for institutions to adopt.

Work closely with engineering on architecture and delivery cadence, managing trade-offs transparently to keep product quality, reliability, and timelines on track—especially around the time-sensitive cycles of the academic and financial aid year.

Define success metrics across the portfolio—spanning adoption, retention, workflow completion, time saved for campus staff, and institutional satisfaction—and hold the team accountable to outcomes, not just outputs.

Collaborate with compliance, security, and risk teams to ensure releases meet our SOC audit standards, FERPA, accessibility requirements, and applicable federal financial aid and student employment regulations.

Annual compensation range for this role is $115,000 - $165,000 depending on experience.