Academic Program Success Lead, New Initiatives

This remote flexible role can be based in any of these states: CA, FL, TX, MA, AZ, NY & IL

Type: Full-time

About Springboard

Springboard is an education and workforce development company on a mission to bridge critical skills gaps by enabling individuals to access high-quality, job-aligned training. It offers flexible, mentor-led programs in high-growth fields including AI, allied health, data analytics, software engineering, and more. Springboard partners with employers, healthcare systems, and workforce organizations to deliver programs that build durable talent pipelines, producing measurable business and workforce outcomes.

The Role

The Academic Program Success Lead, New Initiatives is a critical driver of Springboard's growth into new verticals: equal parts strategist, operator, and team leader. The Academic Program Success Lead, New Initiatives is responsible for all aspects of delivery for our Allied Health and AI programs across B2C and B2B. 

This role is for someone who thrives in the role of a builder: taking early-stage ideas, mobilizing teams, and delivering outcomes that are both business-sound and student-centered. You'll lead new offerings from concept to execution, surface risks and opportunities across existing programs, and translate complex inputs into clear recommendations for leadership and cross-functional stakeholders.

If you're energized by ownership, comfortable getting into the weeds, and motivated by impact that changes people's lives, this is your kind of role.

Key Responsibilities

Portfolio Ownership & Strategic Influence

• Own all aspects of student support and delivery for full student journey for multiple new initiatives from end-to-end, from strategic framing of new courses through execution. 
• Proactively identify capability gaps within programs and student journeys before they become bottlenecks, design and iterate to then operationalize infrastructure. 
• Translate portfolio-level insights surface by the Program Success team into strategic recommendations for Program Leadership, cross-functional prioritization, and roadmapping. 

Team Management & Operational Excellence 

• Directly manage and sustain a high performing team by actively investing in individual development, creating clear accountability structures, and maintaining team energy and focus through rapid organizational change
• Demonstrate a founder's instinct for operational design of a learner’s experience, identifying gaps in process or capability that give you the ability to monitor performance or add friction to the learner journey
• Leverage AI tools as a force multiplier across the team's work, modeling and embedding AI fluency as a default operating practice, not a nice-to-have

Partnership Nurturing

• Play a strong role with external partners, equipping Client Success teams with a POV and context to allow them to be successful, understand client nuance (e.g. B2B marketplace partner versus direct B2B pilots versus B2C)  and design operations to delight and deliver
• Serve as a connective force internally, building trust across teams and aligning cross- functional colleagues around shared goals, timelines, and accountability to deliver on outcomes and enable agility through tight feedback loops.

This Role Might Be for You If You Have:

• 7-10 years of professional experience where you’ve demonstrated  end-to-end ownership over meaningful work, with some portion of that experience at a rapidly evolving startup environment 

• Founder mentality. You have at least one or two clear examples where you personally created an operational capability that did not exist before, in an environment where no one handed you a playbook. 
• Effective people management skills. You are energized by nurturing the professional development of individuals on your team and have a natural ability to energize teams through rapidly pacing changes, and create structure to effectively drive accountability. 
• Strong external partnership skills. You have recruited, negotiated with, and managed relationships with external partners — whether those were employers, clinical sites, vendors, suppliers, or institutional partners. You understand how to structure agreements that work for both sides.
• Operational design instinct. You exercise good judgment on when to build a scrappy MVP versus when to operationalize something. You naturally think in systems and workflows, not just tasks. When you see a problem, you design the repeatable process, not just the one-time fix.
• Speed and judgment. You default to action and move fast, but you have the judgment to know when to slow down — particularly when compliance, accreditation, or partner relationships are at stake.
• AI fluency. You extensively leverage AI tools to amplify your output at high quality. You instinctively reach for AI to move faster, think through problems, and produce work that would otherwise require a larger team.
• Creating structure in an ambiguous environment. You can break down ambiguous, complex problems into workable components, prioritize ruthlessly, and communicate your reasoning clearly across teams.
• Cross-functional influence. You have driven outcomes by coordinating across teams you did not manage. You know how to create urgency, build alignment, and get resources without positional authority.

What does Success Look Like?

First 90 days: 

• Having accountability for delivering on cohorts end-to-end. Making inputs on launch considerations, having context to equip your team to deliver on key outcomes, and have a structure for driving accountability. 
• Have identified 2-3 key risks and are beginning to work cross-functionally toward a systematic solution. You’ve gained some buy-in and can drive the solution design. 
• Have a firm understanding of all programs and client agreements, such that you can contribute a point of view on major risks to delivering nuanced outcomes. 

Within 6 months:

• You and your team have delivered on key outcomes. Retention, Refund, Engagement, CSAT, NPS, Completion, Externship hand- offs for more than one program.
• You have demonstrated strong ownership over experimentation and program iterations needed to deliver said outcomes. You’ve proactively identified and solved ambiguous and known risks to delivery
• Your team is thriving. They have clear expectations, accountability, a sense of team, and are growing professionally. 

Within 12 months: 

• You’ve been pivotal in growing our portfolio of Allied Health and AI programs. Your instinct to deliver high-quality programming while operating with agility has paid off! 
• As courses have matured.  There are playbooks, processes and automations that enable scale have been created and adopted. Your team doesn’t rely on you, but your POV is trusted and sought after across many teams, functions and levels of the org. 
• You’ve done the work to get into the weeds to understand the personas, proposed and implemented material changes to our human guided services model and learner experience, partners, and team members at large.

This remote flexible role can be based in any of these states: CA, FL, TX, MA, AZ, NY & IL