Product Portfolio & Program Manager

Are you enthusiastic about product portfolio management with a strong belief in science education? 

At Vernier, we advance science education by empowering educators and inspiring learners. We’re hiring a Product Portfolio & Program Manager who provides visibility, coordination, and operational leadership across Vernier's product portfolio. This role is responsible for portfolio planning and reporting, resource visibility, cross-functional coordination, support of product development initiatives, and go-to-market readiness. The Product Portfolio & Program Manager helps ensure projects, dependencies, risks, and launch activities are visible and proactively managed to support successful product delivery and informed decision-making.

Essential Functions

Portfolio Management & Visibility

• Maintain a portfolio-level view of active software, hardware, content, and product lifecycle initiatives.


• Develop and maintain portfolio dashboards and reporting that provide visibility into project status, milestones, risks, dependencies, and resource allocation.


• Identify resource conflicts, capacity constraints, and portfolio bottlenecks and escalate recommendations to leadership.


• Facilitate portfolio reviews and provide regular project health reporting.


• Support prioritization and planning activities across the product portfolio.


• Monitor cross-project dependencies and coordinate actions required to keep initiatives on track.

Program Coordination

• Support planning and coordination of product development initiatives across hardware, software, content and cross-functional teams.


• Ensure project schedules, milestones, dependencies, and risks are visible and communicated to stakeholders.


• Facilitate project reviews, readiness assessments, and cross-functional alignment activities.


• Coordinate issue resolution and escalation when project risks or dependencies threaten delivery objectives.


• Partner with project and functional leaders to improve coordination and execution across the portfolio.

Product Lifecycle Visibility & Coordination

• Maintain visibility into PCNs, component lifecycle changes, and related risks across the product portfolio.


• Ensure product lifecycle events and their impacts are visible to stakeholders and reflected in portfolio planning.


• Coordinate cross-functional awareness and readiness activities when product lifecycle changes affect projects, launches, customers, or operations.


• Escalate lifecycle-related risks and dependencies that may impact delivery schedules or portfolio priorities.

Go-to-Market Operations

• Coordinate cross-functional launch planning for new products, software releases, and major product updates.


• Partner with Product Management, Marketing, Sales, Support, Content Development, Operations, and Engineering to ensure launch readiness.


• Develop and maintain launch plans, timelines, and readiness checklists.


• Track launch deliverables including documentation, training, marketing assets, sales enablement materials, support readiness, and operational preparedness.


• Facilitate launch readiness reviews and post-launch retrospectives.


• Identify and escalate launch risks that could impact successful product introduction.

Process & Operational Excellence

• Develop, document, and maintain standard operating procedures (SOPs) for portfolio and program management processes.


• Standardize project status reporting, risk management, dependency tracking, and project intake processes.


• Improve organizational project management practices to increase predictability, transparency, and delivery success.


• Support adoption of portfolio management tools, reporting standards, and best practices.

Secondary Functions

• Participate in employee committees, recognition efforts, and organizational meetings to support and strengthen our culture.


• All other duties as assigned.

Supervisory Responsibility

• This is an individual contributor role.

Education / Skills / Experience

• Minimum 5+ years of experience in project, program, portfolio, or operations management.


• Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Business, Project Management, Operations, or a related field or equivalent practical experience.


• Proven ability to lead complex cross-functional initiatives and coordinate multiple priorities across diverse stakeholder groups.


• Strong organizational, planning, facilitation, communication, and relationship-building skills.


• Experience developing dashboards, portfolio metrics, and executive reporting.


• Experience managing risks, dependencies, priorities, and resource visibility across multiple concurrent initiatives in a product management environment.


• Experience with project management, portfolio management, and reporting tools.


• Ability to influence without direct authority and drive alignment across teams.


• Experience with hardware product development, NPI programs, software development processes, product launches, operational readiness, or portfolio management highly preferred. 


• PMP, PgMP, or similar certification is a plus.


• Commitment to equity, inclusion, and science education.

Other Position Conditions and/or Physical Demands

• Office environment. 


• Hybrid schedule: 3 days per week onsite in Beaverton, Oregon.


• Domestic travel when necessary (<10%).


• Successful completion of criminal, education, and work history background check required.

If you’re excited about this role and our mission but don’t align perfectly with every qualification, we still want to hear from you. We value curiosity, growth, and a shared commitment to science education.

Vernier Science Education is an equal opportunity and affirmative action employer, and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity, or any other characteristic protected by law.