Staff/Principal Product Lead (ACF)

About the role

At Skylight, product leads help shape what we build and why - guiding the vision and direction for software that improves government services for the public. This work is focused on meeting the needs of young adults transitioning out of the foster care system. Skylight is partnering with the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) to build Fostering the Future , a platform that helps young adults aging out of foster care find the resources they need, when they need them. Co-designed with former foster youth and launching in fall 2026, the platform pairs a curated resource database with AI to help young adults in foster care ask the questions they don't know to ask and access the resources they don't know exist. As product strategy lead, you'll guide the product vision and roadmap. You'll help the team set priorities against user needs and program goals, translate research with foster youth into clear product direction, and shape what a genuinely useful, safe, and trustworthy experience looks like for this population. Working closely with researchers, designers, and engineers, you'll help the team navigate what the platform should do, how it should grow, and how we know whether it's working. The platform uses AI and a curated knowledge base to deliver its value, so you'll want enough fluency in how these products behave to help set strategy that's both realistic and ambitious - but your focus is the product and its users, not the implementation. What to know going in You'll join a small cross-functional team of researchers, designers, engineers, and product managers helping the roughly 20,000 young people who age out of foster care each year get the support they're entitled to. This is a fast-moving, zero-to-one effort - a new public-facing federal platform at national scale, where much of the strategy is still being written. You'll be a central voice in shaping it.

Responsibilities

• Lead a cross-functional team of researchers, designers, engineers, and subject matter experts to build and ship high-impact products and services
• Translate needs from users and government partners into a product strategy, including vision, objectives, measures of success, product roadmap, and product backlog
• Manage the direction, scope, and priorities of the product initiative, building from user research to minimum viable products to scalable solutions
• Write user stories, prioritize stories, and build release plans
• Facilitate team ceremonies such as planning meetings, stakeholder syncs, and retrospectives
• Draw on data and feedback to inform the product strategy and roadmap
• Work in close partnership with government teams to transfer digital skills and product knowledge throughout the course of the project
• Creatively navigate bureaucratic challenges, paving the way for more intuitive processes in the future
• Collaborate with government partners to ensure compatibility with existing processes and technologies

Requirements

• Has demonstrated experience leading product development from concept through launch for net-new digital tools, navigating ambiguity, defining scope, and building alignment across cross-functional stakeholders in resource-constrained environments
• Experience with participatory research processes that centered people with lived experience as active collaborators in product definition, ensuring solutions reflected the real needs and priorities of the communities served
• Understand lean product principles and how to apply them (e.g., minimum viable product) at various stages of the product life cycle in order to mitigate risk, validate assumptions, and amplify learning
• Can develop a product strategy that is informed by an understanding of the problem to be solved, prioritizes outcomes over feature sets, and establishes the direction of the product over time (e.g., product roadmap), including success criteria
• Understand how to engage in the process of human-centered design in order to better inform product direction
• Ability to collaborate with folks outside of your discipline, such as researchers, designers, engineers, and others, in order to get things done
• Ability to manage clients and sta

Benefits

Additional Information

About Skylight Skylight is a digital consultancy using design and technology to help government agencies deliver better public services. We're at the forefront of a civic movement to reinvent how all levels of government serve families, patients, and many others in today's digital world. If you want to play a part in driving this critical movement forward, we'd love for you to join our growing team of public interest technologists. The work we do matters.

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