What This Role Is

Every year, hundreds of thousands of students across India decide they want to study abroad. Some come through K12 school partnerships, some find their way in directly. Either way, they enter a journey - discovery, counseling, application, offer, enrollment - that runs through dozens of handoffs between people, platforms, and teams. When that journey works, a student ends up at a university that fits their budget, their course, and their ambitions, and the business realizes revenue at the moment they enroll. When it doesn't, applications stall, deadlines slip, and a student who could have enrolled goes quiet.

The problem is not that any single team is failing. It's that the highest-leverage work in a business like this doesn't live inside one function - it lives in the transformation and optimization projects that cut across Tech, Product, Marketing, and Operations, and someone needs to own them end to end. A funnel improvement that Marketing wants tested needs Product to build it and Tech to ship it. A new process that could remove a structural inefficiency needs someone to design it, prove it, and hand it off cleanly. Right now, that ownership happens informally, project by project, and the work that would compound doesn't get the sustained, disciplined execution it needs.

This is where this role sits. You will run multiple 'Strategize - Build - Operate - Transfer' projects a year - some of them genuinely 0-1 (new ideas that need user research, market research, and hypothesis testing before anyone knows if they work), some of them optimization projects on things that already exist but need better process design and a new benchmark for what good looks like. You will also be asked to take on whatever else is critical for the business to win, even when it doesn't have a job title yet.

You will own full-cycle delivery for these projects - from framing the problem with the right stakeholders, through build and testing, to launch, operating it long enough to prove it works, and transferring it cleanly to whoever owns it long-term. You are the person who makes sure a project doesn't just get discussed. It gets shipped, it gets proven, and it gets handed off in a state someone else can run with.

What Makes This Role Different

Most program management roles ask you to track a roadmap someone else designed. This one asks you to build the roadmap itself - deciding what the next transformation or optimization project should even be, then owning it across three or four functions that don't naturally report to the same person. The Strategize-Build-Operate-Transfer model means you don't hand a project off the moment it launches; you stay accountable until it's actually working and someone else can run it without you.

The Manifest ecosystem gives this role real range: some projects will be genuinely 0-1 - a new idea nobody has tested yet - and others will be 1-100 - scaling something that already works but is starting to strain under its own complexity. Few program roles at this stage give you exposure to both ends of that spectrum in the same year.

This is a build role, not a maintenance one. There is no finished playbook for how these projects should run - you're expected to design the frameworks, set the benchmarks, and prove through disciplined experimentation what should scale and what shouldn't.

What You Own

Transformation projects (Strategize - Build - Operate - Transfer)

Translate a business problem into a project plan that Tech, Product, Marketing and Business teams can actually execute against
Own the full lifecycle of assigned projects - scoping, stakeholder alignment, build, testing, launch, and post-launch review
Own multiple SBOT-cycle projects a year, end to end, from initial strategy through a clean operational handoff
Define what "operate" looks like well enough to prove a project works before transferring ownership
Ensure nothing gets handed off half-finished - the transfer is only complete when the receiving team can run it without you

0-1 initiatives

Lead user research, market research, and hypothesis testing on new ideas before committing resources to build them
Design and run experiments that give a clear read on whether an idea is worth scaling
Turn ambiguous, early-stage problems into a testable plan within weeks, not quarters

Optimization and process design

Identify structural inefficiencies across the business and turn them into scoped optimization projects
Build the frameworks and process designs that make a function run better, not just faster
Set new benchmarks for what "good" looks like once a process has been redesigned

Cross-functional execution and influence

Be the connective layer between Tech, Product, Marketing, and Operations so a project doesn't stall in the gap between roadmaps
Lead cross-functional execution through credibility, influence, and clear decision-making rather than formal authority
Take on whatever else is critical for the business to win, even without a predefined mandate

What Success Looks Like

The markers below reflect where Student Placements is today. We'll calibrate the specifics once you're in the seat. These are directional, not fixed.

In your first weeks, you're not shipping yet - you're building a working map of how projects actually move through Tech, Product, and Marketing today, and forming a point of view on where the highest-leverage transformation or optimization opportunities sit. You'll know you're on track when stakeholders start coming to you before a project stalls, not after.

By the middle of your first year, you've run at least one full SBOT cycle from strategy to clean handoff, and the people around you trust that if you've said something will happen, it will. You've proven, through real experiments rather than opinion, which 0-1 ideas are worth scaling and which aren't.

Longer term, the way the business runs cross-functional projects looks different because you built it that way - frameworks that outlast the specific projects they were built for, a track record of transformations that actually stuck, and a reputation as the person who gets called in when something critical and undefined needs to happen.

The specifics will be calibrated once you're in the role. The direction won't change.

What You Bring

You've spent five to eight years building things inside high-growth environments, and you've likely seen both ends of that growth curve - the 0-1 phase, where the job is rapid experimentation, hypothesis testing, and getting an MVP in front of real users, and the 1-100 phase, where the job becomes process design and managing the complexity that scale creates. You know which mode a problem calls for and you don't try to apply 1-100 rigor to a 0-1 problem, or vice versa.

You have real comfort operating in ambiguity, and more than that, you're fast at moving from ambiguity to clarity - you ask the right question early, you don't wait for someone to hand you a clean brief, and you get to a workable answer quickly rather than a perfect one slowly.

You think in first principles. When a process is broken, you don't default to the existing framework - you rebuild the logic from the ground up and design something better, then prove it works before asking anyone to trust it.

Most importantly, you read the description of what this role is building and your first reaction was not "this sounds like a coordination job." It was "this is exactly the kind of ambiguous, high-leverage problem I want to be handed." That's the person this role is for.

Why Manifest

Manifest Global is building the infrastructure for global human capital mobility - connecting students, schools, universities, and employers across 50+ countries. Our portfolio spans Cialfo (AI-powered college counseling, 2,000+ schools), BridgeU (university guidance for international schools globally), Kaaiser (trusted study abroad counseling since 1997 across India and Southeast Asia), and Explore (AI-powered university outreach, 1,000+ university partners). Together, we move talent across borders at scale. $700B flows annually in remittances from migrant workers. 85M workers will be missing from developed economies by 2030. We're building the operating system which changes that. $80M raised. Still early.

Student Placements is where that infrastructure meets an individual student's decision - and the transformation and optimization work this role owns is what makes that infrastructure work better at every scale it operates at.

Manifest Global is building the infrastructure for global human capital mobility, operating across 50+ countries.

Program Manager

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