Technical product manager

About the role

Campus Connect Group operates a portfolio of software businesses serving the private post-secondary education sector. One of our operating companies runs a mature platform used daily by career colleges and training institutes across North America.

We are looking for a Technical Product Manager to own what gets built, in what order, and to what standard. This is a delivery and prioritization role, not a market research or roadmap visioning role.

You will inherit a backlog of several hundred open items, some of them years old, on a mature ASP.NET and Visual Basic codebase. Your job is to bring order to it: decide what matters, make sure developers receive clear and complete work, and give clients delivery they can predict. If you enjoy turnarounds, this is a good fit.

What you will own

• The ranked backlog. You decide sequencing based on severity, client revenue, and effort, and you can explain that order to an executive team or to a client.
• Triage. Every incoming request classified within one business day: account management work, developer work, needs more information, or declined.
• Work intake standards. No item reaches a developer without a concrete example, expected versus actual behavior, steps to reproduce, and acceptance criteria.
• Release planning with the development lead, including deployment cadence.
• Clear decisions on what we will not do. Declining a request with a stated reason is better for the client than an open item that never moves.
• Weekly reporting on items created versus closed, aging, cycle time, and SLA breaches, and acting on what it shows.

Technical skills

This role works closely with developers on a legacy codebase, so we are looking for genuine technical comfort:

• You can read a stack trace and form a view on what is happening.
• You can write SQL well enough to query a database and check something yourself.
• You can distinguish a display issue from a data issue from a permissions issue.
• You can discuss a developer's estimate on its merits.
• You are comfortable with legacy technology: classic ASP.NET WebForms, Visual Basic, on-premise deployment, and a codebase with years of accumulated decisions.

Experience required

• Five or more years owning a product backlog in B2B SaaS or enterprise software.
• Experience clearing a neglected or distressed backlog, and the ability to describe how you did it and what tradeoffs you made.
• Hands-on configuration of a ticketing system, not just use of one: workflow states, SLAs, automation, and reporting. Zoho experience is helpful. Jira, Zendesk, ServiceNow, or Azure DevOps all transfer well.
• Direct experience working with client-facing teams and with clients, including conversations about scope and timing.

Nice to have

• Education technology, student information systems, or another sector selling to institutions with procurement cycles and compliance requirements.
• Experience through a version control or CI/CD modernization. We are migrating to GitHub and adopting AI-assisted development tooling.
• Enough comfort with data to build your own reports.

What success looks like

• At 3 months: you own triage, every open item has a severity, an owner, and a clear rank, and weekly metrics are published.
• At 6 months: requests for clarification are down significantly and delivery is predictable enough that clients stop chasing.
• At 12 months: we close more than we open on a sustained basis, and aged items are a fraction of what you inherited.

Interview process

Mostly practical and mostly live. Expect a timed triage exercise using real anonymized items, a technical conversation with a developer present, and a discussion of a backlog you have turned around. You are welcome to use AI tools on any written stage; we will discuss the substance in conversation. About two and a half hours across two sessions.