Program Manager

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 recei…