Director, Business Process

About this role

About Amplify

Amplify helps teachers bring delight and rigor to students every day. We have become a leader in K–12 literacy, biliteracy, math, and science by building inspiring teaching and learning experiences based on research. The Amplify Classroom platform combines curriculum, assessment, and supplemental learning into one coherent high-quality instructional system. A pioneer in education since 2000, Amplify has developed deep relationships in states and districts by partnering with educators to drive implementation quality and improved outcomes. Today, Amplify serves more than 18 million students and teachers across all 50 states and on six continents. For more information, visit Amplify.com http://amplify.com.

Job Description:

We are looking for a process design leader who can architect a lightweight, collaboratively-built operating playbook for a complex Product organization. The bar is high in two directions at once: enough rigor to stop the patterns that erode delivery today, and enough restraint to avoid smothering the people doing the work with overhead. You will own and standardize the core processes that govern how Product plans, builds, and ships — but you will design them with business unit partners, not for them. You will also continuously scan the organization to spot where new process infrastructure is needed (and equally, where existing process should be retired or simplified).

The right person for this role has spent a career proving that great process is a force multiplier — not bureaucracy — and has the instinct to feel the line between too much process and too little, and to stay on the right side of it.

Responsibilities:

1. Planning & Roadmapping

Co-design and steward the cross-functional planning calendar for the Product organization — coordinating annual planning cycles, aligned artifacts, delivery expectations, and planned moments of alignment with Sales and GTM. The calendar that actually gets used is the one the people running it helped shape; you build it with Suite Leads, the Resource Allocation team, and GTM partners — not in a vacuum.

- Resolve the misalignment that exists today — inconsistent work planning methodologies across suites, mismatched planning timeframes (platform, digital product, and suites all on different cadences), lack of backward planning for cross-team dependencies, and rolling release cycles out of sync with the school year — by introducing the lightest framework that genuinely solves the problem.

- Maintain dynamic business unit and cross-product roadmaps and ensure alignment across all other planning functions, building shared visibility into where the portfolio is headed and how dependencies fit together.

2. End-to-End Launch Planning & Related Processes

- Design the standardized end-to-end launch process across business units — including launch readiness checklists, health checks, cross-stakeholder touchpoints, release documentation, and clean flow of data from product to supply chain.

- Co-develop the launch playbook with Go-To-Market, Sales, Customer Experience, Marketing, and Supply Chain — building it with the functions executing against it, not imposing it on them. The teams who run launches today have hard-won knowledge; your job is to surface and codify it, not overwrite it.

- Codify ready-to-launch protocols that ensure pricing is finalized, manufacturing and distribution are confirmed, market collateral is approved, and Sales and CX teams are fully enabled — every time, regardless of which suite is launching, and without adding meaningful overhead to the teams doing the work.

3. Stage Gates & Decision Frameworks

- Steward and continuously evolve the five-gate stage gate process that the organization is currently rolling out — including the differentiated tracks (e.g., new programs, new markets, in-market management) so that gating is right-sized to the investment and not a one-size-fits-all forcing function.

- Co-develop refinements with suite leaders and stage gate sponsors as pilots (Science V2, CA K-8 Literacy, and others) generate real-world learnings. The gate process should feel like it belongs to the people running it, not like compliance imposed from outside the suite.

- Manage gate review orchestration — scheduling, materials, decision documentation, and tracking — so decisions made in stage gate meetings actually stick. You stop the “decisions get unmade” pattern that has dogged the org, without turning gate prep into a second job for the teams.

- Own scope change management — the process for evaluating and approving changes after a gate has been passed — so the organization can respond to legitimate new information without descending into the “culture of yes” that erodes delivery.

- Partner with Finance & Analytics to link funding and resourcing decisions to gate readiness, helping deliver against the 2026 KPI that 60% of 2027 R&D spend is vetted through stage gates or an independent strategic framework.

4. Spot Gaps and Build Lightweight, Co-Developed Process

- Identify new areas where process infrastructure is needed: you scan the organization continuously — listening to Suite Leads, project managers, and shared services about where work is breaking down — and you triage where new process is genuinely the answer (versus better tools, clearer ownership, or simply leaving things alone).

- Build process that earns its keep: your default is the lightest possible framework that solves the problem at hand. You instinctively distinguish between rigor that protects delivery and overhead that drains it, and you reach for the former without slipping into the latter.

- Retire and simplify as actively as you create. When a process isn’t working, you change it; when a process isn’t needed, you retire it. You see the absence of a framework as a hypothesis to test, not a mandate to fill.

- Build and lead the central team that designs, iterates on, and supports critical…