Front Doors Product Manager

Title: Front Doors Product Manager
Schedule Format - Location: Hybrid - San Francisco
Pay Information: $106,080 - $110,000
Temporary:  Limited Term, Full Time - 18- Months

This role is onsite at KQED's newly renovated headquarters (https://www.kqed.org/campaign21) located in San Francisco, CA. Applicants must currently reside in San Francisco Bay Area or be willing to relocate.

About the Role

KQED is looking for a Product Manager to own the performance of our homepage and key landing pages — the "front doors" that shape how millions of visitors discover our journalism each month. This role blends programming judgment with product thinking: building the processes, tools, and metrics to support editorial and product teams.

You'll work closely with editorial leadership, engineering, design, analytics, marketing, and events to ensure our most important journalism gets the visibility it deserves — balancing breaking news, evergreen content, franchise programming, promotional priorities, and strategic priorities across a public media audience that spans news, arts, education, and local community coverage.
KQED envisions a public media organization with a culture that centers on human dignity, equity, and belonging. This will enable us to better serve and reflect the Bay Area through diverse and inclusive storytelling.

We value the contributions of marginalized people in society — including Black, Indigenous, and all people of color,  people with disabilities, and LGBTQIA+ people — and we believe that these communities must be centered in the work we do, and we strongly encourage members of these communities to apply.

KQED Code of Ethics   https://www.kqed.org/about/code-ethics

The mission that drives us:

KQED provide citizens of Northern California with a community-supported alternative to commercial media.   We provide citizens with the knowledge they need to make informed decisions; convene community dialogue; bring the arts to everyone and engage audiences to share their stories. We help students and teachers thrive in 21st-century classrooms, and take people of all ages on journeys of exploration- exposing them to new people, places and ideas.

This role will work hybrid between working in KQED's newly renovated headquarters and working remotely.

What You'll Do
- Own day-to-day strategy for KQED's homepage and major landing/section pages, ensuring content placement reflects editorial priorities, audience needs, and real-time news judgment
- Partner with editors and reporters to understand story priority, timeliness, and strategic significance, translating editorial intent into homepage/landing page decisions
- Define and evolve the workflows, guidelines, and (where useful) tooling that support consistent, scalable curation — including rules for automated vs. manual placement, module rotation, and content lifecycle on high-traffic pages
- Establish and track success metrics for front-door performance (engagement, click-through, time-on-page, downstream conversion) and use that data to inform curation strategy and future product investments
- Identify opportunities to improve or automate parts of the curation workflow, partnering with engineering on tooling that reduces manual burden without sacrificing editorial nuance
- Collaborate with design on layout, module types, and page templates that support flexible, effective curation
- Coordinate with Marketing and Events teams to schedule and place promotional content (campaigns, member drives, live events, sponsorships) on the homepage and landing pages, balancing promotional needs against editorial priorities and audience experience
- Monitor site performance and respond to real-time needs (breaking news, election coverage, major community events) with appropriate homepage/landing page adjustments
- Contribute to broader digital product strategy conversations around audience discovery, SEO/AIO crawlability, personalization/recommendations, and content distribution across owned platforms

What We're Looking For
- 3+ years of product management experience, ideally with exposure to media, publishing, content platforms, or audience-facing digital products
- Strong editorial judgment or demonstrated ability to partner closely with editorial teams — you don't need a journalism background, but you should be comfortable making news judgment calls collaboratively
- Experience defining and using metrics/analytics to evaluate content or product performance
- Comfort working in ambiguity and building process/structure where none exists yet (this is a net-new role)
- Excellent cross-functional collaboration skills — this role sits at the intersection of editorial, engineering, design, marketing, and events, and requires translating fluently across all of them
- Comfort balancing competing stakeholder priorities (editorial vs. promotional/marketing needs) with clear, defensible tradeoff decisions
- Familiarity with CMS platforms and how content architecture affects front-end presentation
- Bias toward action balanced with sound judgment — front doors need attention daily, sometimes hourly
- Passion for public media's mission and KQED's role serving the Bay Area

NOTE : This job description is not intended to be all-inclusive. Employees may be required to perform other related duties as necessary to meet the ongoing needs of this organization.

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