Product Manager, Email & SMS

The Opportunity

Chicago Public Media is seeking a strategic, collaborative Product Manager to help lead the organization’s email, newsletter, and SMS strategy across WBEZ, the Chicago Sun-Times, Vocalo, and chicago.com.

Email and SMS are essential ways we build relationships with audiences, connect people with journalism and community experiences, and advance goals in membership, circulation, engagement, and revenue. This role will partner with editorial, audience, and business teams to turn those goals into effective products and audience journeys while building a coherent strategy across Chicago Public Media.

The Product Manager will combine product strategy, platform expertise, audience insight, lifecycle thinking, and experimentation. They will also help define the emerging email and newsletter strategy for chicago.com.

What You'll Do

Set strategy and priorities

• Develop and maintain an organization-wide roadmap for email, newsletters, and SMS, balancing immediate needs with opportunities for audience growth, engagement, conversion, retention, and revenue.
• Partner with editorial, audience, marketing, membership, circulation, events, analytics, technology, and business teams to translate their goals into effective audience products.
• Help define chicago.com’s email and newsletter strategy, including audience needs, product opportunities, lifecycle journeys, and measures of success.
• Facilitate cross-functional planning and decision-making, bringing clarity to priorities and tradeoffs.

Guide products, platforms, and audience journeys

• Serve as a central resource for email and SMS platforms, helping teams select and implement solutions that meet their needs.
• Oversee platform configuration and standards, including templates, lists, segments, permissions, integrations, automation, naming conventions, and workflows.
• Develop audience journeys across acquisition, onboarding, engagement, conversion, retention, recapture, and reactivation.
• Identify opportunities for segmentation, personalization, dynamic content, and automation that create more relevant audience experiences.
• Help teams coordinate cadence and audience overlap to reduce duplication and subscriber fatigue.

Improve performance through experimentation

• Establish goals and measures tied to engagement, conversion, revenue, retention, and audience value.
• Monitor list health, deliverability, journey performance, and other key indicators and work with teams to address opportunities and problems.
• Develop a continuous testing program, including A/B testing, send-time optimization, and personalization experiments.
• Partner with analytics teams to turn performance data into actionable insights and share learnings across the organization.

Build organizational capability

• Create scalable processes, documentation, training, and shared standards for email and SMS.
• Develop an effective intake and support process for teams using these channels.
• Train and support platform users through onboarding, documentation, office hours, and other learning opportunities.
• Evaluate vendors, tools, and integrations to ensure the organization’s technology supports its evolving strategy.

What You'll Bring

• Experience in product management, audience strategy, lifecycle marketing, CRM, marketing automation, digital media, or a related field.
• Strong knowledge of email and/or SMS platforms, including segmentation, automation, personalization, list management, deliverability, and testing.
• Ability to translate stakeholder goals into clear product problems, priorities, scalable solutions, and measurable outcomes.
• A strategic, audience-centered approach that connects editorial, business, technical, and audience needs.
• Experience using data and audience insights to improve engagement, conversion, retention, or revenue.
• Excellent collaboration, facilitation, and communication skills, including the ability to build alignment across teams with different priorities.
• Strong organizational judgment and an ability to create practical systems and shared standards.
• A commitment to Chicago Public Media’s public-service mission and to serving Chicago’s diverse communities with relevance, care, and integrity.

How You'll Measure Success

Teams across Chicago Public Media are more effective at using email and SMS to achieve editorial, audience, and business goals; the organization has a coherent and adaptable strategy for these channels; and chicago.com has a clear, audience-centered approach to email and newsletters as it grows.

Compensation

The expected pay range for this position is $104,000 to $130,000 per ANNUM.

Chicago Public Media provides pay ranges representing its good faith estimate of what the organization reasonably expects to pay for a position.  The pay offered to a selected candidate will be determined based on factors such as (but not limited to the scope and responsibilities of the position, the qualifications of the selected candidate, departmental budget availability, internal equity, geographical location, and external market pay for comparable jobs.